Making tRPGs Compelling Again.

My friends and I started playing tabletop RPGs as teenagers. We had a lot of fun together. Today, I’m the only one still interested in playing tRPGs.

Some of them just lost interest. Some of them are interested but don’t have time: Between the job, family and everything else, it’s hard to find time to sit down with friends for 3-4 hours on a regular basis to play make-believe.

At the same time, my friends do have enough time to play video games, watch Netflix, or even play board games (also for 4+ hours straight). So why did tRPGs drop off the list of our group activities?

I think there are 3 main reasons:

1. RPGs demand significant mental energy investment. They require active participation and can even be emotionally draining. Sitting down on the coach to watch Netflix is definitely an easier path.

2. A session’s quality is uncertain. Let’s be honest, some sessions can drag on, be less fun than expected, or just don’t match the players’ mood. In contrast, when watching a show on Netflix or running a board game you have a pretty good idea of what to expect and the type of emotions you will experience¹.

3. You don’t always get closure after a session. Again, whether it’s a TV show on Netflix or a board game, at the end of the night there is a clear end or victory condition. And even if you end up on a cliffhanger you still have a sense of progress.

(Of course, there is a potential 4th reason: I suck as a GM and my friends are too nice to tell me)

Put differently, tRPGs are competing with activities that are less demanding and generate a trustable and high-quality experience. Of course, when the stars align a tRPG session will deliver an emerging and exhilarating experience that is diffcult to match in other media.

So how can we improve the chances of this happening? As Game Masters and game designers, I don’t think we can do much about reason #1 (except running mindless dungeon crawls every sessions). So when running or designing games, we need to find ways to reliably generate a great play experience and offer meaningful payoffs as part of a single session.

There are of course many Game Mastering techniques that can help. Interestingly, some games are trying to structure and improve the gaming experience directly through the rules. Hamlet’s Hit points classification of story beats or the “mechanical technique” for adventure generation presented in Index Card RPG are interesting examples. Another direction was also taken by My Life with Master, with its pre-defined narrative arc of hubris and terror followed by a fall.

I think designing games to ensure the righ experience from the start is a promising direction. In any case, whether through GM techniques or by design, figuring out to make tRPG sessions reliably exciting will increase the chance of bringing people on board and, more importantly, that they continue to show up.