For most of my life, tabletop roleplaying games have been something I have wanted to participate in, but have seemed inaccessible at every stage. At one point or another, I’d find an interesting game to play, discuss it with friends, and then it would always turn into plans for brunch: it never happened. When it did happen, it was usually with a lighter roleplaying game like Fiasco or Microscope and I didn’t take it for granted. Those games are light on rules and they encourage creativity and improvisation between the players to create stories that are memorable and fun. One participant has described these sessions as: “Roleplaying where nothing matters, we don’t take it too seriously and we can f*** around and see what happens!” 

In spite of the sheer joy these smaller games always provided, I found myself striving for something bigger: a roleplaying game that feels endless. A game with a group of people that can consistently meet up and create a story filled with memorable moments and characters that are uniquely ours. It’s the ultimate romanticization of the potential these games can provide and are very seldomly achieved. After all: “Life, uh, finds a way” to put a stop to anything ambitious or worse, we’re just chasing an imaginary dragon. 

It’s only fair to expect that a storytelling game will always be sidelined in the face of other activities; whether that’s chores, spending time with friends, social clubs, hobbies, work schedules, etc. But what about when an incredibly stressful and traumatic event takes away everything else except for your work, chores, hobbies, and several near-endless streaming services that no one wants to navigate? In my case, it gave me time to explore being a part of a weekly roleplaying game that has been an untapped and necessary source of joy during these strange and uncertain times. 

As to how this happened: it was kismet! Last summer, an acquaintance from art school that I had reconnected with wanted to playtest a mini-campaign for Dungeons & Dragons and I volunteered to help him out. Shortly afterward, I received a job offer that I desperately needed and had to drop out before the game began. While catching up with another friend around the same time, I lamented that I wouldn’t be able to participate in that game; to which he responded that if I was interested, there was an opening in the game he was running. 

By making this offer, he was taking a gamble as his group’s Dungeon Master. Either it would work out and he would be a permanent addition to the group or it would be temporary as this could have been a passing fancy for me or work and money would take precedent. As it turned out, I was the former and have become involved in an ongoing campaign that has lasted a well past a year and has become increasingly perilous with each session. But what about this experience sparks joy for me?

When it comes to being an adult, one thing that I’ve found consistently difficult is the simple act of making new friends. This is not a unique experience, as others I have known have admitted the same thing; it feels harder to forge new connections and we all have different expectations of the relationships that we pursue as we get older. Despite this, we are still social creatures and seek out others to create bonds with and potentially build a connection with. TRPGs are built on social interaction and it’s only natural that connections can inevitably form (if there’s chemistry amongst the players, of course). But what if you never meet your players face to face? Is there a different dynamic and can those bonds even form? My answer is...maybe. 

When it comes to the social elements of our game, I liken it to “A Friendship Simulator.” I’ve never met any of the other players in real life and only know them by their voices on a Discord server. We’re all at different stages in our journeys through life, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles (and at least one time zone,) but we do share one desire: to play a roleplaying game with like-minded individuals. If you were to ask me to put a label on it, I would describe it as a mix between acquaintanceship and an involved parasocial relationship. At least it felt that way at first! 

When I first joined the group, there was an expected unfamiliarity between myself and the others; but I was definitely welcome to be there. I later discovered that this was a mutual feeling, as the other four had only been interacting for five sessions prior and were still figuring each other out. But the more that we met up, the more the foundation of familiarity was laid out. After a month of playing, curiosity would often take hold during pre-game organization or downtime due to delays and questions like “How was your week?” or “What have you been up to?” became easier to ask. As these questions were answered, new ones would arise. We became less reserved, more willing to learn and talk more about the people behind our characters in the times we could. It grew to casual talk on our Discord server in between games, getting brave enough to message each other from time to time, bust each other’s chops, and showing concern for unexpected happenings in our lives and other things that friends do. 

It reached a point in early 2021 when I noticed that one of our players kept playing with their webcam turned on; at that point, only my friend had kept his camera turned on. When it kept happening for about two weeks, I asked out loud: “Gee, I wonder who’ll reveal their face next.” A few moments later, another player turned on theirs, then everyone else followed suit, and what I saw surprised me. We had built a true sense of camaraderie and comfort with one another and were able to go from being disconnected voices to allowing ourselves to be seen at that moment. As I said before, I’ve never met these people and I’ll never truly know them, but it’s comforting and joyful to have a relationship that feels like friendship and will continue until the game concludes by finishing the story or the whole party gets killed off against a difficult adversary. If they want to continue that friendship though, I’m certainly interested! 

Beyond the joy of building new relationships, I find joy in this as a creative outlet. For most of my life, I’ve considered myself to be a “creative type” and have always enjoyed creating characters, the worlds they’d live in, and narratives that would play out for them. It stems from an ambitious childhood dream to make a living off of creating graphic novels, which has gone unfulfilled for

many personal reasons. Nowadays, it has become a creative fire that is difficult to stoke, let alone catch a spark to become a flame that can offer a sense of warmth, but I have noticed that my participation in this campaign has aided in reinvigorating that flame! 

It began as I was building and creating my character, which I took the time to carefully research and create using the source materials my friend shared with me in D&D Beyond. I could have just picked a race and a class, loaded their statistics, picked their skills, and called it day, but instead, I found myself thinking about his backstory, his character traits, his quirks, and flaws. As absurd as it sounds, it was all in the service of creating a believable anthropomorphic caracal wild cat monk moonlighting as a detective that could befriend a dwarf, a minotaur, a robot, and a tiefling in a steampunk fantasy dystopia. 

It was the kind of creative fun that I hadn’t experienced in years! If I had created this character strictly for a story that I had written alone, that story would have been started, overthought, and eventually abandoned due to writing in a vacuum. But when you take storytelling and writing and convert it from an exercise in prose and turn it into a dynamic, interactive, and collaborative experience with others, you learn so much from it. 

I can only offer so much insight into the other players, but I can make the following claims: they have way more experience with TRPGs than I do, they’re creative and imaginative in their own ways, and they’re great at improvisation while embodying their characters through their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In some cases, our sessions feel like casual performances as we alter our voices with tones and accents, describe our actions, and bounce everything off one another. When this occurs, I get to see things from different points of view, how motivations and actions should contribute to a story, and how back and forth dialogue should sound and operate. As a result, the concept of writing feels less daunting and the idea of writing a story with multiple perspectives without getting stuck is so much more plausible than it used to be. While I’m not currently writing a “magnum opus” of any kind, I do feel the desire to write and express myself with stories I want to tell and have fun with it. 

At this point, I could easily conclude this essay and call it a day, but there’s one more thing to mention: I look forward to spending time with these people and playing this game every week. These aren’t words that I’m willing to throw around carelessly! Being a part of this game has been an incredibly bright spot during one of the most uncertain and strange times of our lives and has given me and the group something to look forward to week after week. 

I think that it helps that our sessions are paced similarly to episodic serials that you’d see in comic books, television shows, or open-world video games: each one lasts roughly three hours (four, if we end up in an interesting situation), has a set amount of threads to explore in that time (and whatever else our DM can improvise on the spot) that can aid in moving the story forward and it’s up to the characters to find them. But unlike those mediums, we take advantage of being a character-driven story and have managed to get sidetracked and occasionally de-rail the plot. It’s a free-wheeling imaginative madness that takes an epic fantasy setting, spins it around

in a chair, and slaps it in the face at every rotation until Game of Thrones turns into Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (or Bogus Journey, if you prefer.) 

Over the course of the story, we’ve created a sense of unpredictability that feels missing from so much media that has to play it safe these days. While I still engage with video games, television shows, movies, and books (the latter I do more than most), I find myself less willing to make “appointment experiences” for them. Meanwhile, I’m always willing to make time for this game and find more ways to exist in this world. In between sessions, I think of the events that transpired, the character motivations, and try to find solutions to the problems of the next session. If our Game Master offers us the chance to roleplay during the week in our in-character server, I’m there with the group developing our characters, building relationships, and doing things we had no time for; much to the chagrin of my wife who asks: “Are you talking to your DnD bros?” as I glance at my phone and write passages of roleplay that could exist as prose in a novel or a script. 

In spite of what may seem to be obsessive, it doesn’t control my life and I acknowledge it for what it is: a weekly creative outlet with spent with others whose presence I enjoy and has offered a chance to be creative, dust off skills that haven’t been used in a while and regain my confidence with them. Despite the general acceptance of tabletop roleplaying games in the zeitgeist, I can feel self-conscious about admitting how much I enjoy this. At the end of the day, we all find enjoyment in different things and as adults, we aren’t beholden to anyone in terms of how we spend our time. While some may enjoy vegetating while binge-watching television shows, playing video games for far too many hours, or going out to dinner with friends and doing nothing else, I personally prefer the act of imagining with others as a healthier, creative, and stimulating past time.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Brenton Barnes on Twitter @brentonsquared.