You and your friends are walking down a forest path, the sun is high in the sky and the canopy of the surrounding trees casts dappled shadows across the brown dirt track. It won’t be long before you reach the next town, but something in a nearby brush catches your eye. In a flash, four huge wolves surround your party, their teeth are bared and they look starved. What do you do?
You might have heard about Dungeons & Dragons through last year’s incredible Baldur’s Gate 3, the young kids on Stranger Things, the explosion of live online shows like Critical Role or Dimension 20 – or maybe like me it was something you heard about when growing up, but never really gave them the time of day.
As of 2024, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are the biggest they’ve ever been, with expansive worlds, adventures, intrigue, and of course all the loot and monsters you could swing a sword at. You can be a monster-slaying Witcher in the official RPG for that series, there are official RPGs for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, as well as the standbys of Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun and Vampire the Masquerade.
What all of these game systems have in common is player fantasy – you can be whatever and whoever you want to be. Tabletop RPGs are a way to step out of your own skin and be the hero (or villain) you always wanted to be.
For me, this journey started relatively recently – in 2018 when I moved from Melbourne to Sydney and met my wife, she invited me along to her Dungeons & Dragons group for the first time. I was unsure of how it all worked, what all the different dice did and how to make a character sheet. But they were incredibly welcoming and supportive, showed me the ropes step by step and helped me on my first adventure. Like many, it was the old Lost Mines of Phandelver Dungeons & Dragons introductory adventure, but what I learned so quickly was that just like the videogame I’d always wanted, I was free to make choices and watch the world react to them. Our small party of adventurers befriended townsfolk, laid traps for goblins, foiled the plot of an evil wizard and made it back to the tavern in time for supper. It was a whole new world for me, and one that would quickly become a large part of who I am today.
Today I run three home games playing Dungeons & Dragons as the dungeon master, but also run pub games as a side hustle, and have played Call of Cthulhu, Vampire the Masquerade and Candela Obscura as well. I would never say that I’m an expert in all game systems, but I am certainly a convert to the power of tabletop gaming as a means of bringing people together to tell amazing stories.
Can you give me the basics?
At their core, tabletop roleplaying games are group storytelling. You and your friends get together and each of you plays a character – just like a videogame party – depending on the game you choose these could be medieval fantasy characters, futuristic cyberpunk hackers, modern-day gangsters, teenagers out to save the world, and the list goes on.
You’ll often need one of your friends to be the Dungeon Master, which is a role some people will leap at, while others will run the other way when it’s offered. The Dungeon Master is most simply the narrator of the story, they set the challenges and adjudicate the rules of the game. But while the players have their individual characters, the Dungeon Master plays as the rest of the world, every shopkeeper, goblin, rabid wolf and distressed townsfolk.
Most of us have that one friend who loves spouting weird facts, wants to know the answer to every puzzle, deep dives on easter eggs in games and TV shows, and can talk for hours. They’re probably your Dungeon Master.
“For me, the role of the Dungeon Master is to help the rest of the party be heroes.”
For me, the role of the Dungeon Master is to help the rest of the party be heroes. Understanding their abilities in the game, and then devising challenges for them that push their limits, and help them overcome them. Then when they slay a great dragon, or complete a long crawl through a monster-infested swamp, they feel accomplished, and those challenges are often the biggest and best moments of the game.
For the players then, you’ll most likely have a character sheet, which can be physical or digital depending on your game. I have players who swear by the old ways and must have pen and paper, while others prefer to use phones or laptops and leave the mathematics to the machines. Lately, online tools like DnDBeyond, and Virtual Tabletops like Roll20 have become more popular because they simplify the rules, and also allow players to play remotely online.
Lastly, most systems use dice – these are the tools that tell you whether you win or lose, and add a great deal of chance to almost everything. The easiest explanation is that if you say “I want to hit the goblin with my sword”, I’d say “Roll me an attack roll”, you’d roll the appropriate dice, and then together we’d narrate how you heroically ducked under the charging goblin’s rusty scimitar, sliding on your knees as you took his legs out from under him – sending him sprawling into the dirt behind you.
At the end of the day, dice, character sheets and virtual tabletops are all tools to help you tell the story, and while they do the heavy lifting on the maths side, the story comes to life between the players and the Dungeon Master.
You get a game, and you get a game, games for everyone!
When it comes to accessibility in gaming, I’ll always be the first to stand up and shout from the rooftops – being a gamer with a disability myself. I believe with every fibre of myself that gaming is for everyone, and no one should be able to tell you how to have fun.
That’s one of the reasons I love the tabletop gaming community so much – at the end of the day, it’s you hanging out and telling a story with your friends, and that story can be anything you all want it to be. I’ve played with folks using their characters to explore their own gender identity, to process personal or family trauma, and plenty of folks who want to live a life of adventure without leaving the safety of their home.
“I’ve played with folks using their characters to explore their own gender identity, to process personal or family trauma…”
At the beginning of a campaign, it’s often highly recommended to hold what’s called a Session 0. Session 0s are where the DM gives the players a general vibe of the game and the world – is it low fantasy, high politics like Game of Thrones? Is it space-faring pirates and smugglers? Is it going to be funny, gritty, magical or technological? All this is so that the players can plan characters that fit into the world and have a place in the story. But it’s also an opportunity for the players to share their hopes for their characters and the campaigns. Most importantly it’s also the time to discuss expectations and no-go zones. Will it be combat-heavy? Or have sessions and sessions without drawing weapons? Is anyone at the table freaked out by spiders, small spaces or clowns? Good to know so everyone feels safe.
After I finished my first home game with my group of friends – it was a frozen north survival adventure battling yetis, ice dragons and frost trolls – we hosted our Session 0 and I heard what they wanted; they asked for bigger cities, more magic, more politics and opportunities for intrigue, and a way to make a name for themselves. So our next campaign, set in the Dungeons & Dragons world of Eberron is a high-flying fantasy game of political intrigue, stolen treasures, magical artifacts and world-shaping consequences. Think Three Musketeers by way of Treasure Planet and Indiana Jones.
In recent years, we’ve also seen an explosion of accessible options in tabletop gaming that serve to make the game world more unique and accepting, such as official prosthetic limb rules in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (an official Dungeons & Dragons book), and the Combat Wheelchair – a fan-made item for Dungeons & Dragons that was then endorsed officially. There are also groups like the DOTS RPG Project that champion accessibility in tabletop with tools like braille dice sets.
What if I just want to dip my toes in?
If you’re reading all this and thinking “I don’t know if my friends would commit to playing one game consistently for months or years”, you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to think that. For that reason, there are plenty of easy ways to try out different game systems as a player without committing yourself fully.
Most major pop culture conventions host a tabletop gaming area these days, I’ve most recently seen them at Comic-Con, PAX Aus, GenCon, and SuperNova. Most of these host one-shot sessions, where you drop in, they have premade characters and dice to use, and a DM on staff to run the game, then you play for a couple of hours and complete your adventure, and head home with the memories, maybe a prize depending on the event.
There are also structured sessions at local game stores like Good Games or HobbyCo, depending on where you live, as well as consistent pub games – venues like Fortress in Melbourne and Sydney both host weekly D&D nights, in Sydney we also have Awakened Fables, which runs at pubs around the city of different nights of the week. These games are a great way to try out D&D, or Call of Cthulhu (probably the two most common ones you’ll see), without the big risk of planning a whole campaign and hoping your friends buy into it.
Then if you head along to one of these sessions and everyone says “That was great, let’s do it again”, most game systems have a simple introductory adventure that gives you the basics over a couple of sessions. As an example, the current Dungeons & Dragons starter adventure is called the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle and is exactly what it sounds like – dragons on a shipwreck island.
It’s not all Dungeons & Dragons
I’ve spoken a lot about Dungeons & Dragons in this story, that’s because this is the playground I’ve spent the most time in. But below are a few other game systems (there are plenty more besides) in TTRPGs that you can look into.
Call of Cthulhu / Candela Obscura
If you’re a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, body horror and existential dread, Call of Cthulhu is an old standby in the tabletop genre. It’s well-known for being punishing as a game system, but leans heavily on the “ordinary folks fighting extraordinary horrors” trope. It has features like tracking sanity and can veer heavily into horror territory depending on the Game Master. Similarly, Candela Obscura is a turn-of-the-century noir game recently released by the Darrington Press team that is part of Critical Role. Candela Obscura is quite simplified compared to a lot of other game systems, and only relies on six-sided dice, it also does away with battle maps, and focuses on theatre-of-the-mind, where everything takes place in the player’s collective imagination.
This relatively new kid on the block (pun intended) is heavily inspired by the vibes of Stranger Things, The Goonies and Stephen King’s IT – where an ordinary group of – you guessed it – kids on bikes set out to save their small town from something strange. The system has been made popular by the streamed game Dimension 20, which has used it for a number of seasons to great success. The game is comparatively simple and focuses heavily on the vibe of the world, rather than the specifics. An incredibly unique system in Kids on Bikes is that rather than character stats like other games have, instead your skills are depicted by different dice. So a D6 (standard six-sided dice), might represent your Charm skill, that you use to talk your way past a security guard. If you happen to roll a 6 on that dice, it ‘Explodes’, which means it levels up to a D8, and the next time you roll charm, you use the bigger dice. It’s thrilling in person, and means your character naturally evolves as the game progresses. There are also expansions named Kids on Brooms and Teens in Space, which are designed around a (legally distinct) wizarding school for kids, and a pulp sci-fi adventure.
For the gritty futuristic worlds, you need not look further than Cyberpunk or Shadowrun. Cyberpunk of course is the tabletop game that inspired Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadowrun has had its fair share of PC ports. Either of these has a strong following filled with hackers, powerful corporations and more neon-dripping streets than you can count.
A dark and rainy noir look into the inner workings of vampire clans in the modern day – Vampire the Masquerade is a game system I’ve only dabbled in, but I’ve heard rave opinions about since I was in high school. If you’ve played Vampire the Masquerade PC games, you’ll likely have an idea of this world, but it’s all about interpersonal struggles and clan hierarchies set on the modern-day backdrop of crime and city life.
There are plenty of other game systems with strong followings, including the official tabletop games for The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and others. The crux of this is that whatever your flavour of escapism, if you can find a few friends and a tablet to play at – the world is your oyster.
What next?
As a gamer slowly growing older, it feels normal to struggle to find time to spend with your friends, we all have jobs, families and other commitments that fill our weekends and weekdays.
But for us, getting together for a game is the perfect excuse to block out a Saturday afternoon once a month. Everyone brings a plate of snacks or a beverage, we dim the lights and roll out the game mat, and we tell a story together. As the Dungeon Master, I can guarantee those stories never ever go the way I’d planned them to, but the stories that I make with my friends are always far more memorable than I could have hoped.
So get some friends together and roll some dice, fight goblins, be creatures of the night or arcane investigators, but tell amazing stories together and you’ll remember those stories forever.
About the Author
Nathanael Peacock
He/Him
Nathanael is a gamer with a disability, he has a titanium spine and sets off metal detectors wherever he goes. He is a big time tabletop gaming fan, also loves horror movies and RPGs as well as long walks in dark and spooky forests.
