Intermission

Are you soured on RPGs for never giving you the options you want to take?

Does the endless grind of playing an MMORPG make you long for an actual story?

Is the D&D-style dungeon crawling loot grab just not your style?

Are you uninterested in games that consist solely of a GM lining up things to kill?

23.06.02 On The State of Roleplaying

It's been almost two years since my game Witcher: Signs and Portents concluded after nearly ten months of play. The state of roleplaying as a hobby has changed quite a bit since then.

Nobody could have predicted how the Covid-19 Pandemic forced us all indoors and online. Similarly unpredictable, and just as unhealthy, was the rise of adventure gaming to near-total dominance of the tabletop hobby. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Gloomhaven that, even though they share many things in common with roleplaying games and are often marketed as such, are not roleplaying games.

Instead of embodying a character to collaboratively tell a story, adventure games see the player inhabit an avatar with a list of abilities to be used in combat. They are, in many ways, the antithesis of roleplaying, but they also demand less creativity, intelligence, and focus on the part of the player.

Thus, as tends to be the case whenever 'serious' goes up against 'casual', roleplaying games have been systematically pushed out of the tabletop gaming sphere in favor of adventure games. Looking about on forums and in local gaming stores, one is inundated with D&D groups to the point where it seems that nothing but D&D even runs anymore. Tales abound of overpowered starting characters created through rules loopholes, wacky hijinks from players acting randomly to spite their DMs, and sick burns or one-liners that caused everyone to laugh at the expense of one player.

Scratch the surface, though, and you find that there are plenty of tales, but no actual stories. There is no depth to any of these interactions. People show up (often under the influence), barely pay attention except when called upon, get off some snappy quip, and then leave, having contributed the minimum necessary to advance the game written down in the DM's module.

Well, if you're here, reading this, then you're probably not one of those people. You're probably like me, wondering where all the real GMs have gone. I'm here, and this site is here, to tell you that we still exist. We may just be a little hard to find, is all, but it doesn't mean we're gone entirely.

The Realm of Table still exists, waiting for those brave enough to seek it out. And when those of Free Will and Character return, with a little dedication, the Realm will thrive once again, and they will find their G.O.D. smiling down upon them.

Jacob Matthew
Gamemaster