I love tabletop roleplaying games to a slightly obsessive degree. The first time I flipped through a D&D book on the shelf at a bookstore next to the science fiction novels, it enthralled me with the previously unimagined possibility of assigning numbers to characters and bouncing them off of each other like a narrative physics simulator. I played RPGs regularly throughout my teenage years, and kept reading every book and blog I could find ever since then. I’ve spent years writing my own, and slip back into thinking about design theory as my default mental resting state.
Yet – and indeed, this is a “yet” arguably deserving a bold font and all-capital letters – I cannot help but realize that video games are fundamentally superior to tabletop games in the majority of cases. Video games accomplish almost everything tabletop games can do and then some: they handle all of the bookkeeping, they automate all the setup and cleanup, they add animation and sound and music, and they do it all for roughly the same price tag to the end user most of the time. They aren’t limited to simply providing smoother and fancier versions of tabletop experiences, either: video games allow for a vast variety of entirely unique genres through real time interactions and discoverable mechanics. They’re an amazing form of art that sprung into existence shortly after modern roleplaying games did, and stand as the greatest competitor to the time and interest of potential players. They’ve already pillaged some of the best parts of tabletop, too: TTRPGs may have invented gradual piecemeal character advancement, but “RPG mechanics” are now a staple of video games, and that is not the only concept they’ve lifted.
We of the tabletop roleplaying community do not like to think about this. It makes our entire hobby seem outdated and limited. Why are we spending all our energy making games simple enough to be executed on clumsy human hardware when we could be teaching ourselves Godot and getting in on the biggest entertainment industry in the world, where all the money and press is?
Fortunately, there are reasons, and some very good reasons at that. Tabletop games retain a grasp on the collective conscious precisely because they hold certain advantages that video games will remain incapable of achieving for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever, depending on the future arc of technological development. In these precious factors, we find the soul of tabletop roleplaying and – I would argue – the primary things we ought to be optimizing our games for, instead of attempting to play catch-up with mechanics other media already surpass us at. Little wonder, then, that the major cultures of play within the hobby seem to nucleate around them.
The Four Pillars
First of all, the most obvious: roleplaying. That is to say, acting: getting into character, talking like them, thinking like them, maybe even dressing up like them. Certainly, in many video games you can customize your character to a minute degree and make decisions how you think they would, but while this is an entirely valid practice, it cannot replicate the social component of playing pretend with your friends, especially in-person. I’ve seen this called “magic tea party” play with a straight (non-judgmental) face, and I think that phrasing captures the primordial childhood nature of the underlying drive. A relatively pure focus on this unique attribute is found in live action roleplaying (especially the highly social Vampire the Masquerade style, as well as the immersive Nordic tradition) but you see it a great deal around tables as well.
Second of all, lateral problem solving. You can already guess the culture of play built around this pillar: the NSR (née OSR), with its core concept of “tactical infinity”. This mode of play emphasizes the sense of inhabiting a fictional world more than inhabiting a fictional character, giving the players a sandbox of (notionally) unlimited possibilities, if only they possess the cleverness to find them. Video games, no matter how exhaustively coded, cannot offer this degree of depth, because it relies on a human interpreter (typically the GM) offering spontaneous detail when questioned and making judgment calls on what happens when the players attempt something unusual. A perfect map of the territory would be the same size as the place itself, so a video game cannot cover all possible interactions, but a human can passably make them up on the spot.
Third of all, storytelling. This one is often confused with play acting, but on the most basic level they’re not the same impulse: acting is bottom-up, storytelling is top-down. It corresponds roughly to the author and director stances in play, the desire to create an interesting sequence of events that the characters move through. Storytelling-primary games (Universalis is a classic example) often blur the boundaries of being roleplaying games per se by drawing the metaphorical camera back to view the larger picture of the dramatis personae in total rather than a singular point-of-view character. Humans have been telling stories – often entirely off-the-cuff – since before recorded history, but video games have only occasionally made serious attempts at offering this kind of experience. This category functionally overlaps quite a bit with the one before, since its uniqueness comes from the ability of humans to think outside of the box and address hypothetical situations. This is the essence of appropriately named “storygame” subgenre.
Fourth and finally, tactility. Simply put, a tabletop is a real thing: dice are physical objects you can roll around in your palm. No matter how impressive, video games as we know them only deliver light and sound, or at most rumble. A tabletop game can give you the pride of painting a squad of miniatures and pleasure of pushing them around on an actual surface, and there’s something more real about that, even if the imagined narrative is fake. Likewise, the people sitting across the table from you are real, flesh-and-blood human beings you get to interact with – unless you’re playing over a call or by post, of course, which those of a more introverted disposition may actually find preferable. The traditional and neo-traditional styles often (although not invariably) cleave closely to this basic joy, in part due to their relationship to the wargames that spawned them.
So upon review, tabletop games actually hold some high value cards, in spite of the seeming dominance of electronic media! Therefore, when we make TTRPGs, we ought to concentrate on what only they can deliver: ask yourself why the game you’re designing wouldn’t be better as a video game. This can be a harsh self-critique, but it’s worth considering. It’s fine for supporting systems of a tabletop game to tread the same ground as video games, but the core should always remain within the spheres of their unique virtue. Choose to make your game about acting, creativity, storytelling, and tactility, or you risk consigning it to a dead end of artistic development. We can’t win going toe-to-toe with the solid state juggernaut, but we can stand tall beside it by delivering what it cannot.
Even so… the boundaries of those seemingly inalienable strengths reveal themselves as porous upon close inspection. Arguably, even the MUDs and MUCKs of the early internet allowed for a certain type of acting, lateral thought, and storytelling – the distinction between electronic and tabletop exposes itself as to some extent arbitrary at this level, since those text-based games essentially replicated tabletop-like experiences through computers, so they’re hard to fully disentangle as mode of play. Similarly, storytelling is already partially ceded ground if you count something like RPGMaker as a “game”, and I could imagine games that more directly positioned themselves as vehicles of narration.
One could also argue that that the pillar of creative problem solving can already be approximated by video games built with comprehensive attention to detail: a game like Dwarf Fortress simulates a fictional world with such lavish elaboration that it almost might as well be counted as tactical infinity within the likely bounds of what a player might try. This, at least, requires a herculean effort and dedication to vision that few developers can muster, and ultimately can only reach the asymptotic limit of what an unbound human mind can think up extemporaneously.
The Future
However, the inexorable advance of technology all but promises to erode the privileged position of TTRPGs further. As a prime example, VRChat is working tirelessly to extend the reach of electronic games to include acting, driven (like many fields of science and engineering) in significant part by furries on a quest to more perfectly embody their idealized inner selves. Virtual reality blurs the distinction between the experience of physical and digital, and more advanced forms of it may conceivably bring our first pillar fully within the grasp of video games. Tactility, as least, remains firmly beyond the capability of computer simulation, barring the invention of direct neural interfaces that can believably spoof the sense of touch – but even in saying so I accept the possibility of such a thing happening eventually.
Lateral problem solving persists as perhaps hardest to replicate digitally. Some will tell you that a large language model could supplant a human gamemaster, but I simply do not believe that: such programs lack the kind of memory and coherent thought necessary to craft a satisfyingly logical world. Only a truly human-like intelligence can create the kind of concrete-feeling narrative players crave. As such, the problem of video games offering tactical infinity is isomorphic with the problem of strong AI, so we can reasonably assume we’re safe for quite a while.
I wouldn’t worry too much about any of that, though. Even if computers fully subsume gaming as a concept, that is not a loss but a triumph, an entwining transcension of what we once knew as RPGs into a flowering of new modes we can as of yet barely conceive. Let our cyborg descendants sort those things out once they come to pass: we exist in the here and now, and as it stands we hold the precious opportunity to make art that matters to us, in a format we hold dear.
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