Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
Question: is 35 years old too late to start playing Dungeons & Dragons in its traditional tabletop form? Very probably, but more and more it feels like a blindspot that needs addressing. For years I’ve nodded along quietly as videogame developers explain how in their work they’re just trying to capture the sensation of their regular D&D session, but in 2023 the game became an unavoidable part of mainstream pop culture. The film parlayed its setting into a surprisingly enjoyable romp. Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated the pleasures of its ruleset to those of us with no tolerance for watching or listening to other people play an RPG. D&D has even made its way into party small talk – the other kind of party.
Over beers and loud pop music, an acquaintance enthuses about the campaign she’s been DMing. I reply that, hey, I’ve just started running one too. Then hastily explain that it’s not actually D&D but rather “a kind of deconstruction of it”. Cue boos and hisses from everyone within earshot. And rightly so, although in truth this isn’t some hipster-cred stance. It’s just, more or less, the only tabletop RPG I’ve ever played.
The game in question, Die, is a frankly ridiculous place to start. Deeply in conversation with the tropes of D&D and its lineage, this is the equivalent of playing Braid and Super Meat Boy before you’ve ever even touched Mario. As for why it happened this way, well, my motivation was the same as that of any loot-hungry adventurer: gold. I first played Die as a freelance journalist, the commission enough to overcome my +3 resistance to the idea of pen-and-paper RPGs.
On first hearing about their existence from a schoolfriend, I was scared off by the misunderstanding that the process required donning a cape and strutting around talking like a vampire. Later, I was dissuaded by RPG systems as I knew them from videogames: a shorthand for stat increases and sacks of loot which can be tacked onto the side of another game. The origins of these things on the tabletop were, surely, a solution to a problem most visually driven games don’t face, a way of concretising the abstract, in described action. In The Lord Of The Rings, say, Tolkien gets to decide what Gandalf or Shelob or Sting can and cannot do at any given moment; when multiple parties are equally responsible for the narrative, you need a way of pinning down consensus reality.
This is the equivalent of playing Braid and Super Meat Boy before you’ve ever even touched Mario
There’s a line in Die’s rulebook that had me reaching for the highlighter: “Games are conversations mediated by rules”. This is remarkably similar to the definition I was already using to set the, ahem, limits of this column: any activity done solely for pleasure, with an agreed-up
