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About Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs): How a structured, voluntary, and temporary checkout from reality is necessary for the human mind – if not a survival skill.

Keywords: TTRPGs, D&D, Escapism, Board Games

Published onMay 05, 2024
About Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs): How a structured, voluntary, and temporary checkout from reality is necessary for the human mind – if not a survival skill.
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Disclaimer: I’m not a psychologist, but a lifelong player, game director, and, lately, game designer. This post aims to describe the underlying psychology of this hobby.

At first, it was an initiation; someone would introduce you to the hobby. Arcane tomes with cryptic language and vivid pictures of imaginary entities, like sacred books of ancient civilizations. Curious artifacts, dice imitating gemstones, carved with numbers or even more strange symbols sometimes, meant for you to roll and know your fate, and later we were hoarding bags full of them. A round table with a Master of Mysteries guiding you on your first timid steps into your first adventure in the theater of your mind. All of those elements were part of our experiences as we grew up in 99% of societies during 99% of our history, in the form of tales, foundational myths, and songs; a tradition ended after the “Enlightenment,” for our non-linear and non-rational experiences and traditions were deemed superstition. This early initiation into the realm of Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) highlights their role not just as a pastime but as a useful psychological and social toolkit, allowing us to engage in structured and imaginative escapism that is as necessary for mental development as it is for survival in a complex world.

In a TTRPG, we are called to walk the Hero’s Path, take action, and finally become heroes (a mostly male need and trait, explaining why most fans of this hobby is masculine). The game allowed us to try and train abstract thinking, strategy, and social interaction, sometimes successfully, sometimes met with failure, and the lessons of dealing with frustration and consequences in a safe way for our physical bodies in a room with people we trust so we will not experience public shame.

It made us sharpen our creativity and storytelling by increasing our vocabulary to create shared experiences to tell and retell in the years to come, as real as those of war veterans. We were ignorant back in the day, but TTRPGs let people safely try out new personalities (or masks), to toy with aspects of their personalities, some of them dark, evil sides, to deal with past wrongs done to them or extroverted behaviors we could not or would not be able to experience in the world outside of our imaginary worlds because of our lack of confidence or conventional comeliness to ease our social interactions.

Even though being a sandbox, a make-believe fantastic scenario, the presence of a ruleset to deal with situations in a consistent way provides a frame, a predictable scenario where you can try and test your character’s strengths and weaknesses and also get predictable outcomes, and since we were not using ourselves, we were forced to walk in other characters' shoes, to imagine how other people would react to our actions, preparing us to learn empathy.

These games invite us to investigate nature, the dark side of mythology and nature, and be comfortable dealing with them, just like the fairy tales of old used to do. Our basic instincts and dark corners of our personalities are able to integrate into our lucid world in a very organic and Jungian way.

Over time, everybody wants to become more immersed in the game world, and they start to read fantasy, history, law, and old customs, connecting them to their land and history and giving them a sense of belonging. TTRPGs provided, and still do, an avenue for those who are not into the extroverted side of people to make a mark in the world of myth, in the theater of their minds. Then others want to be the game referee, taking on themselves the task of preparing the adventure, of making the worldbuilding, the leading role and meddling with conflict with and among players, taking a decision, and moving on; needed skills in work life.

It’s inevitable for some players to try to become Game Master/Director/Referee, taking the whole process of worldbuilding, giving voice to all the village people, acting as a monster and keeping the game within the ruleset in order for players to have fun; a payless job done just for the love of the game and getting as the only reward the memories created during the game. A mindset of generosity. 

Differences Between “Old School” and “Modern Audience” Mindsets

In the early days of the hobby, fighting was not always the answer for the original idea in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) was about survival in a very hostile environment. The dungeon ecosystems – typically an underground complex built by wielders of arcane, forbidden, or secret knowledge that often weren’t humans – filled with monsters and traps but also treasure and other rewards. All those elements made resource management the focal point of the gaming experience of the day; food, water, spells, torches, weapons, including hit points (more likely life) were fast to get exhausted in combat, so avoiding unnecessary fights was a key element of the strategy of the nowadays known as “Old School” all the way up to Advanced D&D 2nd Edition. Things stayed that way until the end of the original publisher, TSR, due to bad management, the same problem with the actual publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC, property of Hasbro).

The rate of death for low-level characters was high, so those playing characters (PCs) were created in a very simplistic and streamlined method to make them ready to play fast in the middle of game sessions if not ready in advance.

After WotC purchased the intellectual property in the early 1990s, the D&D 3rd Edition was released. Now, the idea was to create backgrounds and long lists of feats and skills by race, lineage, class, and whatnot, making the process more personalized and creating a commitment for players to keep their PCs alive, which created a precedent for future editions to make it harder for PCs to die by providing some safeguards and initial powers just at the moment of creation. These changes were incremental during successive editions until the actual one, D&D 5th Edition.

D&D 5th Edition became popular due to the COVID lockdowns because extroverted people were forced to look for other ways of entertainment, but this sudden popularity had the effect of diluting the original mindset in order to be more alluring to a potentially bigger consumer base, and it worked very well, but the newbies came from a generation who lacked literacy skills, frustration management, and planning but heavily indoctrinated in gender ideology and Critical Race Theory; thus the current fanbase is having a hard time getting Game Referees or not spoiling the game to state some political point. 

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