Why do I play role-playing games?

This started as a response to a question raised by an American game designer of my acquaintance and evolved into a rather long-winded essay-like text. Then I figured, I could just as well post it here as well. So here follows an unedited version of the text...

Why do I play role-playing games? The answer boils down to two things, basically.

First, I consider the RPG format a wonderful and largely unexplored outlet for storytelling. I have loved telling stories from since I was a child, whether by means of comic strips, simple text-based computer games, musical libretti or even attempts at novels. It took very little to spark my imagination and get the creative juices flowing. As a kid, I was a voracious reader and my attention always jumped from one exciting thing to the next, so I actually finished very little of my ‘projects’.

I had been a role-player since before I realized it (I intentionally do not use the word ‘gamer’, although I was that too, as any kid I loved playing all kinds of games, a trait which I have managed to, fortunately, carry on through to my adulthood). In my time in elementary school, while the other kids used to fool around with balls or, you know, beat each other with sticks… (trying to remember what is a proper way of conduct for an average eight year-old, my mind suddenly went blank), me and a couple of my chaps used to scuttle to a quiet corner of the classroom and play our game of make believe.

It had next to nothing in terms of rules and the only limit of the game was our imagination (I doubt we even thought of it as of a ‘game’, actually). Each of us was a captain of his own spaceship in our shared syncretistic universe, inspired by some of the series, which used to air on Slovak TV channels in the middle to late 90’s, such as Star Trek: TNG or Babylon 5.

"Captain! There seems to be a... thingie, just up ahead!"

In these games, I was the one who presented the dilemmas, the plot hooks, propelling the story ever forward, as influenced by the actions of the participants, adjudicating their actions and coming up with an exciting, but rational outcome these actions could lead to, stealing shamelessly from all manner of fiction and media (as any aspiring storyteller should), putting incongruous things into one big pot of shared fun. If you roll your eyes and think that I, pretty much, just gave you a common definition of a game master’s job, you are right, of course, but I, myself, did not realize I was any such thing. In fact, I did not even know that such thing as a ‘game master’ existed.

Without being taught any rules or principles, role-playing came naturally to the members of our little group. We had no inclination to act out the scenes we were creating in our heads in real life, as opposed to how children usually use to play. In our imagination, we had unlimited budget for special effects, which no manner of toy or prop could even come close to (in fact, not many Hollywood blockbusters could). You could say that, while most kids played LARP, we played RPG.

In time, through one of my older brother’s classmates, I got to experience my first real pen-and-paper role-playing game. I had been already acquainted with some computer game renditions of this medium, and had also read articles about this intriguing game called Dungeons & Dragons, that in my eyes acquired almost mythic proportions and was said to exist in the far-away lands beyond the ocean. But it was not until around fifth grade that I actually got to play a real RPG.

The game was called ‘Dračí doupě’ (Dragon’s Lair), basically a Czech AD&D 1^st edition rip-off made because the authors’ plea to let them translate Dungeons & Dragons into Czech was ignored by the TSR at the time. So they made DrD (this is the acronym used for the game) in 1990, which then went on to become the most popular tabletop role-playing game in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

"Kolik směn mi vydrží hořet tahle louč?"

This was the rule-set, under which my first dungeon-crawling and various heroic (and also not very heroic) deeds took place. Although a little unsophisticated and limited compared to some modern and world-class RPGs, it has earned wide acclaim and has become immensely popular, especially with kids around the age of  junior high as a part of their extra-curricular activities. It appealed to them with the unique features specific to RPGs, its arcane obscurity, as well as its high fantasy atmosphere.

The great degree of penetration of this game in schools was astounding, in my opinion, when we compare it to D&D in America of the 80’s, where role-playing games, I suspect, were more of a college thing. Now, another conspicuous difference is, while D&D players use to persevere through college and beyond, Dračí doupě is usually dropped by high school, when the player leaves his circle and goes on to play other games or, in an overwhelming majority of cases, stops playing altogether and his gaming past remains just these few odd episodes of his school years. This is at least my impression, although, I have no hard data to fall back on, and so it should be taken with a grain of salt.

I, as well, had grown to crave more ‘advanced’ systems, which would better facilitate my more and more ambitious needs as a player and as a storyteller. Because at the time none of the Slovak hobby stores carried D&D (and the Internet was still by and large considered to be a funny nerdy gadget instead of a life necessity, as we know it now) I had to go to Prague to buy it. I wanted to become one of the chosen, who had the privilege of owning the fabled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, the mere mention of which mesmerized all the gamers and fantasy enthusiasts in our part of the world.

I still remember getting to the store, asking for AD&D, not realizing a shift to the 3^rd edition had taken place recently, and the feeling of puzzled disappointment when, being handed the draconically priced Player’s Handbook with the words ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ on it, I thought “What is this? Where did the ‘Advanced’ bit go? I want my advanced rules!” But I had grown to love the game none the less and, taking advantage of the Lord of the Rings movie craze of the time, I managed to get together a group of my friends in high school and pull of a regular D&D campaign, which started in a world of my own design and later moved on to the Eberron campaign setting.

Before continuing recounting the history of me as a gamer, let me briefly return to the basic question behind the story. I have mentioned that I consider role-playing games a great way for channeling creativity and, in a way, realizing one’s imagination. This is, in my opinion, the basis on which thousands of gamers world-wide are having fun playing RPGs – it’s a multi-faceted, engaging form of interactive entertainment. The conclusion most people settle on, I imagine, is that D&D and similar games are a great way to spend fun time with a group of friends. But I would go beyond that, and to the heart of the reason why I love role-playing games, and that is - they have the potential of being art (or, more precisely, of being something I perceive as an art form).

At the risk of stating the obvious, let me recount my reasons for this claim. I think that RPGs combine the making AND experiencing of art in one nifty package. First there are the writers and artists, who make the rulebooks and the campaign settings, who capture the imagination of the audience, invite the players to play in their worlds. On another level, a given group’s game master / dungeon master / storyteller uses this materials as an inspiration for creating his own amateur stories, makes the game fit the needs of his players in order to entertain them, taking on the roles of a writer, an actor and a game referee, all at once. Then, he and the players engage in a unique activity, a shared experience of free-form, impromptu theater, tactical wargaming and social interaction, all the while creating a unique story, which then becomes a little part of the bigger picture, the shared meta-narrative of all RPG players around the world. With RPGs, anyone can become a storyteller.

The trouble when explaining the use of polyhedral dice in RPGs to non-gamers is that Czech and Slovak languages do not distinguish between the words 'die' and 'cube', thus resulting in me saying things like "Hoďte si osemstennou kockou!"

While literary production has been driven by sales and tastes of its audience since times long before remembering, role-playing games push boundaries of the dialogue between the author and the audience to an unprecedented level. The audience’s taste is shaped by the games they play, the experience they are provided, and, in return, they shape the industry. They buy the products, the art, they give the authors feedback (which has been made wonderfully simple by the recent onset of the Internet age), participate in evolution of the game with their own house-rules, additions, storylines, fan fiction and even full-blown worlds. Some of them go and become professional authors and game designers themselves, but that is beside the point.

This dialogue that takes place in the RPG world (i.e. the real world where RPGs are played), even if we consider the most basic level of a group of people playing out the fiction provided to them by both the distant professional designers AND their friends, is quite unprecedented with regards to any known art form, barring perhaps post-modern theatre. It could well enough be the current next big step in shared storytelling, a step that may have been awaited by some people since the age of stone tablets, the ones who thought that by transcribing words on a page, some of that immediacy of sitting around a campfire telling each other tales might have been lost.

The second important reason, for which I treasure RPGs and fantasy role-playing in particular, is its ability to transport an individual into the world of imagination and a limitless number of stories that, I believe, lie dormant, hidden deep inside all of us since the time in our childhood, when we first heard the tale of the entrepreneuring young boy set out to make a fortune in the world, the fair princes and princesses or the little girl and the big bad wolf. RPGs are very much concerned with myth; they tie into something fundamental in our culture and transform it to a different shape and form, while, ideally, still maintaining the ability which good fiction has – i.e. striking some deeply embedded imaginative chord in human subconscious.

Going back to my story, the next big break in my role-playing and dungeon-mastering career came with the discovery of the Eberron campaign setting, conceived and co-created by author and game designer Keith Baker. The book was an unexpected Christmas gift from my brother and I had no previous knowledge about the setting or its creator. I found out that it was a deep, captivating, well thought-out world that brought a breath of fresh air into the stale waters of fantasy role-playing. Instead of done-to-death fantasy tropes of Tolkienesque narratives, it introduced intrigue of the film noir, Lovecraftian horror and pulp action in the vein of The Riders of the Lost Ark all in one consistent package. It was brimming with inspiring material and it is difficult to praise any one of its draws above the others.

However, what I admire the most about it, is Keith’s modus operandi, his ability to re-imagine the well-known patterns and stories of role-playing games, to take the existing D&D mythology (which itself is a derivate), combine it with the most interesting aspects of contemporary pop-culture and make something new, yet strikingly familiar. It is the next re-interpretation of our fundamental mythological patterns, part of that ongoing process that takes place in RPGs as well as the entirety of the fantasy fiction genre. But, the thing with Eberron is, it could not have happened (or not have worked nearly as effectively) in any other medium, but a campaign setting for a role-playing game.

A campaign setting is, basically, an open-ended narrative, an interactive piece of fiction, a crossroads, from which an unlimited number of paths fork out for the willing traveler to trod on and bring him to the limits of his imagination. This is something that Salman Rushdie anticipated, when talking about the influence of videogames on literary fiction. And that, for me, is Eberron. It would not have worked as a movie, a stand-alone novel (although novels can complement it) or some other traditional form of art. It is not a derivation of a literary setting; it has been creating with the aim of interactive storytelling in mind. It is all-inclusive, and while having been created by Keith Baker and being a legal property of the Wizards of the Coast, it has no single owner, but many and every person has their own version of Eberron. Myself included.

The iconic Wayne Reynolds artwork from the original Eberron Campaign Setting.

This pretty much sums up my RPG growth and the important events and preferences that have facilitated it. I hope I have managed to explain my reasons clearly enough. Where do I go from here? Wherever the stories take me. I may abandon D&D as a role-playing system of choice, when I decide it has ceased to fulfill my needs as a narrator or as a player. I may continue playing it just for fun when I am able to. But what I know for sure is that the world of Eberron will remain a constant inspiration.

I plan to carry on playing and fiddling with role-playing games in the future, because I think they are one of the most exciting things that our age has to offer, and I feel that the bigger part of their heritage (and the influence they will have on our culture) still remains to be seen. I strongly believe it is worth seeing, and plan to be part of it.
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For, how Neil Gaiman puts it: “We owe it to each other to tell stories.”