Tabletop RPGs

RPGs can be played with sheer imagination. Or the players can use rulebooks, dice, and character sheets. Games using such paraphernalia are called tabletop RPGs.


A war-gamer named Gary Gygax invented tabletop RPGs in the 1970s. The earliest tabletop RPG was called Dungeons & Dragons, and it featured fantasy lands and playable characters like magic-users, warriors, and thieves. Dungeons & Dragons appeared briefly in the 1982 Steven Spielberg film E.T. the Extraterrestrial and paved the path for further tabletop RPGs that came after. So, even though there are lots of other popular tabletop RPGs available, when we examine tabletop RPGs, we’ll reference the way Dungeons & Dragons operates.


In tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, one player, titled the Dungeon Master, creates the fictional world by drawing maps on paper and placing landmarks and objects on those maps. The Dungeon Master conveys the fictional world to the other players by describing it as vividly as he can. He also controls any character not controlled by the players, including the monsters they must eliminate and the townsfolk they might ask for clues or help. The Dungeon Master makes up the challenges and obstacles the players must overcome. The players overcome them through creative cooperation and fully utilizing their imaginary characters’ skills.


Besides the Dungeon Master, each of the other players creates a character to play or picks a ready-to-play character. Like the protagonists of a novel or the heroes in a movie, these player characters are central to the story the Dungeon Master evokes. The Dungeon Master’s story is an adventure story and can be as simple as a dungeon crawl, rooting through catacombs looking for treasure while hacking up monsters, or as complex as a murder mystery. These adventures stage the proving ground for the heroes to perform their valiant or wicked deeds.


There’s an element of rule and randomization that the rulebooks and dice serve in Dungeons & Dragons (Figure 1.4). For instance, if a monster is going to attack the player character, the rules say that the monster must roll one 20-sided die (1d20) versus the player character’s Armor Class (AC). The die roll provides a random element, just like in gambling, so that no two moves are ever quite the same. The rule provides the framework for the action, so that the Dungeon Master can resolve the make-believe with mathematics.


A tabletop RPG would be nearly identical to a fast interpretative stage play if it weren’t for the rulebooks and dice. In fact, people who play tabletop RPGs can often get “into the role” just as much as a drama student in a Shakespeare play. But most tabletop RPGs do not involve stunts or moving about. Instead, players sit comfortably and say out loud what their characters are doing. They let the rules and dice interpret the actions for them.


If you think that tabletop RPGs are too old-school or nerdy, you should do a YouTube search for “Vin Diesel on Dungeons & Dragons,” as there are several video interviews with action star Vin Diesel about playing one of his favorite games growing up. Diesel sees tabletop RPGs as a “training ground for our imagination and an opportunity to explore our own identities.”


What follows is a typical script excerpt taken from a night playing Dungeons & Dragons.


Dungeon Master (DM): You enter the dark and foreboding crypt of Nurall. The sounds of skittering rats and dripping slime echo back at you from the pale granite walls. The space is roughly thirty feet by thirty feet, with a single torch lighting the space from a stone column rising up in the center of the crypt. Along the walls you see carved niches that appear to be filled with rotten coffins and moldering bones. There are roughly eight of these niches, four to both sides, and an iron-bound oak door set in the wall at the other end of the crypt. A circular iron grate hole rests in the lowest part of the paved floor. What do you do?


Thief: I immediately go to the right-side wall and search the niches to see if I can find any treasure in amongst the rags of the dead. Do I find any?


DM (after a quick die roll): You find ancient pocket lint and three shiny gold coins. That’s it.


Warrior: Do I still have my torch? I thought I dropped it in our exit from the stairwell earlier.


DM: Your torch is lying guttering at the darkest recesses of the stairwell, where you dropped it.


Warrior: Is the torch in this room secured to the column, or can I pry it up and take it with me?

DM: You could attempt to pry it out of the sconce.

Warrior: Good, that’s what I’ll do.


DM: Just as you start prying it up, you hear a click noise coming behind the stones that make up the column. There’s a gurgle and screech under your feet, and suddenly you see something shiny and black start to ooze out of the floor grate.

Warrior: That’s not good!


Sorceress: I attempt to use Discern Intent on the ooze. Is it malign or evil in any way?

DM: Yes, it’s definitely malignant.

Thief: Let’s get out of here! I run to the door and check it for traps.


DM: That will take you until next turn. Meanwhile, the ooze is filling the room. It hasn’t reached you, yet, but it soon will.


Warrior (to the Sorceress): Don’t you have a spell or something that could plug up the grate? He said it was a circular grate hole. It can’t be very big. Is it?

DM: The grate is approximately a foot in diameter.


Sorceress: Would casting Web on it do anything? The Web spell’s good and sticky. Would it slow it down, at least until Thief there gets the door open?

DM: You can try.

Sorceress: Okay. I cast Web on the grate hole, then. What happens?