What's the point of a role-playing game?
“Because it’s fun,” you might say. Steve Perrin offered a similar answer in Wild Hunt #16, 1976: “The idea, good people, is to have fun.” Certainly, but that can’t be the end of the discussion. Plenty of activities are fun, from reading fantasy novels to performing improv. What makes role-playing games singular?
In the 1970s, such questions were commonplace, although not universally welcomed. When Stephen Lortz published his series “What Is a Role-Playing Game?” in Different Worlds in 1979, one reader dismissed it as abstract discussion “for no discernible purpose.” Similar criticisms persist today, where philosophical inquiry is often derided as pointless semantics.
I would argue that these discussions are essential to the evolution of any art form. As board game designer Clint Bigglestone observed in Different Worlds #3, 1979, “no two people appear to agree on exactly what ‘role-playing’ is.” Nearly fifty years later, we still lack a common understanding, increasingly accepting that the hobby means whatever it means to each participant.
Meanwhile, tabletop role-playing has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Actual-play programs fill arenas, crowdfunding campaigns raise millions, and an enormous commercial ecosystem sells everything from custom dice to digital maps. This success has diversified the hobby, but whether it has strengthened our understanding of it is less certain.
Perhaps the problem is simply that role-playing games have become mainstream. When a hobby moves from an insular community into popular culture, its identity can become taken for granted. Yet the early hobbyists had no such luxury. Drawing from miniature wargaming, science-fiction fandom, and fantasy literature, they had to establish not only how these games worked, but what they were.
Early rulebooks offered few answers. Who proposed actions? Who rolled the dice? Was the referee a neutral adjudicator or a storyteller? Even the terminology was unsettled. “Role-playing game,” “fantasy role-playing,” and “adventure gaming” competed to describe the emerging hobby, each emphasizing different aspects of the experience. These disagreements were never merely about words. They reflected competing ideas about what the activity actually was.
Language remains a stumbling block. When we call role-playing games “storytelling,” do we mean inventing events collaboratively or constructing a coherent literary narrative? When we call them “games,” do we mean activities with defined objectives and victory conditions, or open-ended play in which participants improvise together? Without clarifying our terms, meaningful discussion becomes difficult.
This matters more than ever. In the 1980s, hobbyists worried about newcomers who approached role-playing primarily as a means of accumulating power and optimizing characters. Today, similar concerns surround players whose expectations derive from polished actual-play productions. With countless creators offering conflicting definitions of the hobby, how can six strangers at a table know they are anticipating the same experience?
We have no shortage of advice about mechanics, encounter design, character creation, or table etiquette. What we lack is sufficient reflection on what role-playing games are for.
Historically, answers have varied. Some early designers emphasized progression and exciting adventures; others prioritized immersion, character portrayal, or dramatic performance. For some, the appeal lay in inhabiting a character and exploring a fictional world; for others, it was the tactical challenge of overcoming obstacles, accumulating power, and advancing a character. Still others saw the hobby as a form of improvisational theatre, with the gamemaster acting as director, or as a collaborative exercise in storytelling. These are not necessarily interchangeable activities, and the distinction matters.
Yet the comparison with storytelling has always been contentious. Gary Gygax argued that games and novels were fundamentally different: novels have predetermined conclusions, whereas role-playing characters must remain flexible enough to respond to unforeseen circumstances. Predetermined narrative outcomes risk reducing players to actors following a script.
The comparison with improvisational theatre raises a different problem. Role-playing certainly involves improvisation, but is improvisation itself what makes the hobby distinctive? Actors improvise, as do comedians, yet neither activity necessarily offers the same freedom to interact with a world governed by rules, uncertain outcomes, and consequences that persist beyond a single scene. Role-playing may borrow from theatre without being reducible to it.
And then there is the question of whether role-playing is even a game in the conventional sense. Many games have defined objectives, rules, and some means of determining victory. Role-playing games, by contrast, can be open-ended, with no predetermined conclusion and no requirement that anyone win. If the objective is simply to enjoy the experience, does that make role-playing a game in the same sense as chess, or something closer to the imaginative play of children? The answer depends, of course, on what we mean by game in the first place.
Contemporary commentators have argued that what sets role-playing games apart is the freedom they afford their players. In an open-ended game, players can attempt things that neither the designer nor the gamemaster anticipated, making for choices and consequences that cannot be predetermined. But if freedom of choice is what role-playing games do best, to what end? That alone is not a sufficient answer.
In my view, there is something else they uniquely offer, building on their unparalleled agency. In the right context, they can create a sense of catharsis.
In 1977, Len Kanterman and Charles Elsden suggested that Dungeons & Dragons could provide insight into one's own thoughts and relationships. Other early writers described role-playing as a form of psychodrama, in which players project aspects of themselves onto fictional characters. By inhabiting someone different from ourselves, we might explore unfamiliar motivations, emotions, and perspectives.
This potential remains relevant today. Members of the LGBTQ+ community, for example, have used role-playing to explore sexuality and gender identity in a comparatively safe environment. Characters can provide distance from difficult questions while allowing players to experiment with possibilities they might otherwise struggle to confront.
Emerging research offers encouraging, though still preliminary, evidence of broader psychological benefits. Small studies have associated tabletop role-playing with improvements in well-being, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Surveys also suggest that players value the hobby for emotional processing, stress relief, and social connection. These findings do not establish role-playing as a substitute for professional mental health care, but they support the idea that its significance extends beyond entertainment.
Eric Holmes, editor of the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and a professor of neurology, described the game in Psychology Today in 1980 as a “shared fantasy.” Its fictional world becomes a social reality, reflecting something of the people who inhabit it. The game, he suggested, can function like a giant Rorschach test.
Perhaps the hobby's many competing styles are not simply disagreements about how to play, but different expressions of what players seek from the experience. Some want intellectual challenges; others seek social confidence, creative expression, theatrical performance, or the temporary empowerment of inhabiting an extraordinary character. Others want to explore parts of themselves that ordinary life leaves little room for.
One wonders if all the varying styles of play weren’t actually, at their core, the search for this catharsis. The intellectually curious seeking to exercise their problem-solving skills; the isolated practising their social improvisation; aspiring authors seeking the gratification of instant feedback; would-be actors using the table to flex their theatrical chops; marginalized or otherwise powerless people looking to feel super-powerful; and perhaps those apprehensive of their ordinariness wanting to feel extraordinary. The motivations may differ, but perhaps the underlying impulse is much the same.
If so, role-playing games may not be a game at all, nor even a narrative, but rather a support group, and conflict between players, the phenomenon of the “problem player,” may sometimes be less a matter of playing incorrectly than of disagreeing over what this particular group is meant to provide. One player might want tactical challenges, another an improvised drama, and another a space to explore their identity. Each may be playing in good faith, yet their expectations can be fundamentally incompatible.
Some will disagree with me, and that’s to be expected. The conversation can, and should, go on. If we want to see our hobby appreciated as an art form, the focus of discourse must be shifted away from mechanics, merchandise, and marketing, and again give due consideration to the nature of the game itself.
When a newcomer asks what role-playing games are, what will you tell them? Is it about writing pages of lore, in-depth character biographies, and compelling narratives? Is it about collecting dice, designing miniatures, and drawing maps? Is it improvisational theatre, a game of tactical problem-solving, or a shared exercise in storytelling? Or is it just something fun to do with your friends, no more special than a rowdy game of Candy Land?
There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Tell them why you do it.