[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think people play tabletop games in order
to experiment with roles and situations that
are just very different from their everyday lives.
It feels like a cool way to kind of hack together ideas
that I'm thinking about anyway and, oh, I
want to go have fun with my friends.
What all RPG games have in common
is this collaborative storytelling process.
The idea that you would participate
in this open-ended storytelling experience
was completely groundbreaking.
I trace tabletop games back mostly to chess, to war games,
and then to role-playing games, and there's
a fascinating continuum that goes
through all of those practices.
The earliest things we know about chess going back
to the Indian subcontinent, the people who
played it understood that it taught
some virtues and strategy, to, say, young officers who wanted
to be able to understand better how to command troops
in the field.
And when chess came to Europe and became popular
in the 16th and 17th centuries, people
continued to adhere to this belief
that it could help you to learn how to be a better commander.
The problem was that by this point,
chess little resembled the battlefields of the day,
so there was an effort to try to modernize chess.
People added maps with detailed skills to them
and artillery ranges and statistics
of how weapons behaved.
And from there, those were copied by American sources
late in the 19th century.
There's a particular game called Strategos
and one of the authors of Dungeons & Dragons, Dave
Arneson, was part of the group of gamers
who found Strategos and kind of adapted it
to their circumstances at the time.
It's really about exploring characters and stories.
You have this opportunity to kind of negotiate
between the players how the story's going to go,
and that was a radical, disruptive innovation
at the time that RPGs came onto the scene.
We would say 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons came out
was the beginning of RPGs.
Moving stories out of something you passively experience
and into something that's interactive
is one of the things that makes Dungeons & Dragons very
distinct.
You actually get to be the person making these decisions.
The beauty of role-playing games
is that you can play anything you want to play.
You can be anything you want to be.
You can step outside of yourself and all the players
at the table are creating a story together.
And sometimes the Dungeon Master can create the campaign.
Sometimes the whole party can create the campaign
as you're adventuring.
He used the necromantic magic contained within
to call for the army of Red Warriors from the Netherworld.
And then the Dungeon Master will
decide the goals of the game and what you are actually
going to do session by session every time
you meet-- where you're going to go,
what's going to happen to you, things like that.
I focus just on the story.
I don't worry about the mechanics.
I don't worry about the monsters, stats, or anything
like that.
At first, I just want to tell a good story.
So basically what happens is the DM, the storyteller,
is going to say, all right, so you walk into this cave.
It's dimly lit.
What do you do?
The goal is to progress the story
as far as we can through exploration,
asking questions, feeling out our surroundings,
getting a sense of what does it smell like?
Is it damp?
Is it misty?
When I hold my torch, do I see something
moving in the distance?
Is it low light?
It's dark.
You're underground, so it's low light.
It's dark.
So basically you're going to try to continue the story along
as far as you can go until that Dungeon Master says, "Roll
for it," because as soon as the Dungeon Master asks
you to roll the dice, that's when you
have a possibility of failure.
If you roll a natural one on the saving throw, you die.
With the tabletop RPG, there's no limits
to what you can do aside from your dice, really.
You're just limited in how well you succeed.
And how well you succeed always makes for a better story,
always adds a new element that can be build off
to something unexpected or a change in the scenario
that then everybody just jumps on
and can go from there, which makes it very much about what's
happening right now, in the moment,
together sitting down at this game.
I'm interested in world-building and hanging out
with my friends, so for me tabletop games
are a personal experience.
They're about collectively telling a story,
coming up with really cool ideas,
and seeing how different ideas kind of fit together and change
over time in an unexpected way.
So every two years, I'd love to force
myself to sit down and say, what are the things I'm
interested in really abstractly in terms of theory,
and then how can I bring those things into a fun game
experience?
So for example, a couple of years
ago, we all had agreed that we liked
the more sci-fi elements in D&D and we didn't
like the magic stuff as much.
So I said, OK, there's not going to be any magic
and there is going to be basically
a third lobe to the brain that allows
for some sort of weird piezoelectric psychic stuff--
so mind reading-- because the rules are very flexible
and because it's a very personal experience with your friends.
The game has become about the future of a humanity that's
been genetically engineered.
RPGs are a great way to talk about big ideas
precisely because they're fun and they're not
your subjective consciousness.
They're a group consciousness.
You guys come in.
I'll raise the game for you.
FEMALE (OFF-SCREEN): Thank you.
Run!
I really love that sort of exchange
and the idea of collectivity that I'm setting out
some big framing conventions, but my players are filling it
in and they can kind of add to the framework, the world
that I've invested in.
You're always letting them make choices
and you're always bringing in crazy new thematic punches out
of left field.
And the more you play with people, the more
that they surprise you with their ideas.
It's an imaginary game, and it's only happening in your heads,
so it's fun.
I think the culture's been influenced in an incredibly
positive way by D&D. D&D paved the way
or blazed the trail for the acceptance of geek culture
and maybe helped later generations feel like it's
OK to do what they do now.
I would argue, we wouldn't have the popularity of Lord
of the Rings or Harry Potter or World of Warcraft
had it not been for D&D making the world a little safer
for geekdom.
All that stuff that we see in modern video games
are really entirely based on what
was pioneered in the game of Dungeons & Dragons-- things
like choosing a character and equipping it
with different things or choosing
the race or the class of the character or going up a level
or having this sort of numeric equivalence
to sort of measure how well your avatar doing in the game.
The fact that these kinds of games are experiencing
a resurgence has a lot to do with the pervasive way in which
the internet and all kinds of non-face-to-face social
activities have completely invaded our lives.
And I think there's a real longing in the culture for just
an opportunity to sit around on a Friday night and play a game.
The biggest thing that D&D has done, I feel,
has really reconnected us to our storytelling past,
and there's something really wonderful
that we still are able to tell stories
to each other around the table.
I think there's definitely a resurgence of interest
in tabletop RPGs today.
People are looking for something to do
and a way to meet people and play face-to-face again.
I don't know if it's always going
to be this way, especially in the era of video games becoming
more socially acceptable, but there's
a lot of variety within the world of RPGs.
What I love about D&D and other RPGs is it
allows us to entertain ourselves.
It's always going to appeal to people
who want that experience that they can't get any other way.
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