When your gaming group shares stories about their favorite gaming moments, nobody ever says, “Hey, remember that time we stumbled across that orc encampment, and there were precisely the right number of them to fight, so that we felt a little threatened but not really too much?” “Oh yeah, I drank a minor healing potion! EPIC!”
Balance is good. And that means it’s the enemy of perfect. Let it go.
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The Three Pillars
There are supposedly three pillars that hold up tabletop RPGs: roleplaying, exploration, and combat. These pillars cover almost everything you can think of. But based on attempting to materialize this metaphor, I’d wager that, whatever structure “roleplaying games” take on, three pillars aren’t enough.
What kind of architecture requires only three pillars anyway? Are RPGs some abstract triangular colosseum? Surely they’d form a nice box or rectangular shape. In that case, there must be a fourth pillar to maintain structural integrity! I call that fourth pillar of roleplaying games fun.
Why We’re Here
Plain and simple, the reason we’re even here is because we like to play games. They’re fun, they offer an escape, they allow us to take our imaginations out for a stroll, and they let us strategize and simulate.
Sure, there are nuances around why we might play roleplaying games, but the reason gaming at all is as prevalent as it is now is because everyone needs an escape. There’s an endless array of things that draw us toward RPGs, but at the core, really and truly, it’s just about enjoying ourselves.
A Distinct Medium
RPGs are a completely different medium than books, movies, music, theater, and video games—although they can encompass all of those things.
For the same reason other mediums excel at what they do, whether that’s visually telling a story, building characters and a world to lose yourself in, or participating in those worlds or the lives of those characters to shape their outcomes, RPGs do all of it, except the way the action unfolds is a lot less isolated.
Sure, there are multiplayer video games, but all video games are limited by what the programmers put into them. You can see a movie with a friend or join a book club, but the fun of an RPG is limitless and hinged upon the people you play it with.
This is a double-edged blade, but it’s an edge that perhaps cuts the deepest into our imaginations and egos. I have memories of things that happened during game sessions that I’ll remember far longer than any book or movie, because RPGs are so personal.
Personalization
I say they’re personal because, no matter how you look at it, you are spending time in the company of several other folks for hours on end. Whether in person or online, you immerse yourself in your game but also in the people you’re with. I often see attempts to form pickup games in Discord, subreddits, or on LGS corkboards, and I’m always apprehensive. Not because I don’t think it’s possible to play with random people and have a great time or make new friends. But based on anecdotal evidence, these slapdash game groups often don’t work out well.
Anything other than a one-shot should require an application that’s taken into consideration by some sort of highly trained RPG human resources wizard to ensure maximum compatibility for all participants. Gamers need an app, like a dating one, but instead of finding love, it’s for finding other like-minded folks to play elf games with. Think about it! You’d set up a profile and tick the boxes of the systems you enjoy, the metagame elements you like, in-game preferences, a bit of personal background info, and voila—algorithmic magic aids in pairing you up with a great group!
We Play to Come Together
Tangents aside, the point I’m trying to make is that we play these games to come together, to share laughs, to tell stories, to imagine “what if.” Telling these stories is one of the most human things possible, and I’d wager storytelling is one the most important practices in the history of all humanity. It’s comforting to do something so human during a time when the world seems to feel increasingly harsh.
I’ve been yelling about abandoning the rules and making your own way for this whole series. On top of that, you can also throw my advice out the window. Do what sounds fun to your group, not what some writer says or what some streamer implies or what an algorithmically lucrative YouTube guide might tell us.
Sure, let others influence you and help add depth and color to your perspective on RPGs. But at the end of the day, it boils down to being yourself and finding others to play with to have fun. We like to get caught up in worldbuilding, homebrewing, and our bespoke classes and campaign worlds. There’s nothing wrong with that. At the table though, we can just be present and try to have fun.
We live in strange times and are lucky enough to afford ourselves the leisurely act of playing these games. So after all of this, what I ask of you, dear reader, is to have fun. Nothing more, nothing less.
Game excellently with one another.
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