[music playing] I think people play tabletop games in order to experiment with roles and situations that are just very different from their everyday lives.

It feels like a cool way to kind of hack together ideas that I'm thinking about anyway and, oh, I want to go have fun with my friends.

What all RPG games have in common is this collaborative storytelling process.

The idea that you would participate in this open-ended storytelling experience was completely groundbreaking.

I trace tabletop games back mostly to chess, to war games, and then to role-playing games, and there's a fascinating continuum that goes through all of those practices.

The earliest things we know about chess going back to the Indian subcontinent, the people who played it understood that it taught some virtues and strategy, to, say, young officers who wanted to be able to understand better how to command troops in the field.

And when chess came to Europe and became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, people continued to adhere to this belief that it could help you to learn how to be a better commander.

The problem was that by this point, chess little resembled the battlefields of the day, so there was an effort to try to modernize chess.

People added maps with detailed skills to them and artillery ranges and statistics of how weapons behaved.

And from there, those were copied by American sources late in the 19th century.

There's a particular game called Strategos and one of the authors of Dungeons & Dragons, Dave Arneson, was part of the group of gamers who found Strategos and kind of adapted it to their circumstances at the time.

It's really about exploring characters and stories.

You have this opportunity to kind of negotiate between the players how the story's going to go, and that was a radical, disruptive innovation at the time that RPGs came onto the scene.

We would say 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons came out was the beginning of RPGs.

Moving stories out of something you passively experience and into something that's interactive is one of the things that makes Dungeons & Dragons very distinct.

You actually get to be the person making these decisions.

The beauty of role-playing games is that you can play anything you want to play.

You can be anything you want to be.

You can step outside of yourself and all the players at the table are creating a story together.

And sometimes the Dungeon Master can create the campaign.

Sometimes the whole party can create the campaign as you're adventuring.

He used the necromantic magic contained within to call for the army of Red Warriors from the Netherworld.

And then the Dungeon Master will decide the goals of the game and what you are actually going to do session by session every time you meet-- where you're going to go, what's going to happen to you, things like that.

I focus just on the story.

I don't worry about the mechanics.

I don't worry about the monsters, stats, or anything like that.

At first, I just want to tell a good story.

So basically what happens is the DM, the storyteller, is going to say, all right, so you walk into this cave.

It's dimly lit.

What do you do?

The goal is to progress the story as far as we can through exploration, asking questions, feeling out our surroundings, getting a sense of what does it smell like?

Is it damp?

Is it misty?

When I hold my torch, do I see something moving in the distance?

Is it low light?

It's dark.

You're underground, so it's low light.

It's dark.

So basically you're going to try to continue the story along as far as you can go until that Dungeon Master says, "Roll for it," because as soon as the Dungeon Master asks you to roll the dice, that's when you have a possibility of failure.

If you roll a natural one on the saving throw, you die.

With the tabletop RPG, there's no limits to what you can do aside from your dice, really.

You're just limited in how well you succeed.

And how well you succeed always makes for a better story, always adds a new element that can be build off to something unexpected or a change in the scenario that then everybody just jumps on and can go from there, which makes it very much about what's happening right now, in the moment, together sitting down at this game.

I'm interested in world-building and hanging out with my friends, so for me tabletop games are a personal experience.

They're about collectively telling a story, coming up with really cool ideas, and seeing how different ideas kind of fit together and change over time in an unexpected way.

So every two years, I'd love to force myself to sit down and say, what are the things I'm interested in really abstractly in terms of theory, and then how can I bring those things into a fun game experience?

So for example, a couple of years ago, we all had agreed that we liked the more sci-fi elements in D&D and we didn't like the magic stuff as much.

So I said, OK, there's not going to be any magic and there is going to be basically a third lobe to the brain that allows for some sort of weird piezoelectric psychic stuff-- so mind reading-- because the rules are very flexible and because it's a very personal experience with your friends.

The game has become about the future of a humanity that's been genetically engineered.

RPGs are a great way to talk about big ideas precisely because they're fun and they're not your subjective consciousness.

They're a group consciousness.

You guys come in.

I'll raise the game for you.

FEMALE (OFF-SCREEN): Thank you.

Run!

I really love that sort of exchange and the idea of collectivity that I'm setting out some big framing conventions, but my players are filling it in and they can kind of add to the framework, the world that I've invested in.

You're always letting them make choices and you're always bringing in crazy new thematic punches out of left field.

And the more you play with people, the more that they surprise you with their ideas.

It's an imaginary game, and it's only happening in your heads, so it's fun.

I think the culture's been influenced in an incredibly positive way by D&D.

D&D paved the way or blazed the trail for the acceptance of geek culture and maybe helped later generations feel like it's OK to do what they do now.

I would argue, we wouldn't have the popularity of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or World of Warcraft had it not been for D&D making the world a little safer for geekdom.

All that stuff that we see in modern video games are really entirely based on what was pioneered in the game of Dungeons & Dragons-- things like choosing a character and equipping it with different things or choosing the race or the class of the character or going up a level or having this sort of numeric equivalence to sort of measure how well your avatar doing in the game.

The fact that these kinds of games are experiencing a resurgence has a lot to do with the pervasive way in which the internet and all kinds of non-face-to-face social activities have completely invaded our lives.

And I think there's a real longing in the culture for just an opportunity to sit around on a Friday night and play a game.

The biggest thing that D&D has done, I feel, has really reconnected us to our storytelling past, and there's something really wonderful that we still are able to tell stories to each other around the table.

I think there's definitely a resurgence of interest in tabletop RPGs today.

People are looking for something to do and a way to meet people and play face-to-face again.

I don't know if it's always going to be this way, especially in the era of video games becoming more socially acceptable, but there's a lot of variety within the world of RPGs.

What I love about D&D and other RPGs is it allows us to entertain ourselves.

It's always going to appeal to people who want that experience that they can't get any other way.

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