I love stories. I love writing stories, reading stories, telling stories. I love good movies and good television and good video games and good books. Stories are not why I play tabletop roleplaying games. There are so many other sources for stories and they’re all so much better at telling stories than pen & paper games are. Tabletop games are actually garbage at telling stories. Mind you we have plenty of stories to tell about what we did after playing them but that is not the same thing as the game telling a story.

So why do we play games then? Or I suppose why do I play games? That’s the question I’m going to answer. Then like any good writer I’m just going to assume that I’m completely correct and make sweeping generalizations about the entire medium.

We play games to embody, to go on adventures and inhabit bodies that we cannot in our “real” lives. Whether because of purely physical limitations or those limitations that we impose on ourselves via our ethical principles, we cannot or will not delve into deep dungeons to loot treasure or rescue far trader from space pirates or lead a troop of knights in a gallant lance charge or uncover dark conspiracies of eldritch cultists. That is what games are useful for. We DO things within them. Game systems are the means by which we mediate between ourselves and the world which we are attempting to adventure within.

We can tell stories about our adventures to people after the fact but the game itself has no “story”, it’s not (or at least shouldn’t be) a carefully crafted narrative with characterization and plot nor is it at all similar to improv comedy. It is a much deeper experience than mere narrative. It is an experience of a life other than our own, it is an embodied practice, a ritual that creates new beings and new worlds that we sink into and become. By the sacred words and occult mathematical descriptions hidden within rulebooks we utter into existence new realms and make real the flesh within them.

A game session is therefore not a passive telling but an active doing. Active tense. I swing. I lift. I look. I press my ear to the door. I spit blood from my mouth. Active. Doing. Players are actually solving the mystery, not telling a story about detectives who did it outside of themselves.

Now you may ask yourself, where is this all going? Why does it matter? How can I apply this to my games? Besides my own high-minded ideas about truth and forming the correct theoretical line? I do not have a fucking clue! This is the highest pursuit: ultimately useless speculation based entirely around the personal experiences of a shut-in geek who has read too many books and ran tabletop elf games for more hours than is healthy. Truly, I am the real inheritor of the Socratic tradition!