I have been a player of Dungeons and Dragons for about 10 years of my life. I very fondly remember picking up it from my dad. One day he sat me, age 6, and my brother, age 8, down at the kitchen table with “dad’s models that Brian isn’t allowed to touch” and explained to us the basics of a tabletop roleplaying game. I remember sitting down at 6 years old with a graph paper map, a little metal wizard model, and eventually dying from a skeleton’s arrow, about 20 minutes in. Ultimately, this experience led me to continue with the game up to the present day.
If you’ve never played a tabletop RPG, it’s similar to a roleplaying video game, except instead of a computer controlling non-player characters and the world in which you play, another person is, who is known as the Game Master. This allows the players to freely explore and partake in a vivid world that can be ever changing as needed because it is monitored by the GM. This means video games can never truly give more options than a tabletop RPG. If I am the GM, I roleplay each character and monster my players face. There is no choice of 3 conversation sentences, like in a video game, because I can respond within the context of the character. The options are literally limitless.
Dungeons and Dragons specifically plays off the success of high fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, and has been going strong for 40 years, however there exist other options. Many people prefer Pathfinder, which is the primary competitor of Dungeons and Dragons, and plays about the same way. But if high fantasy isn’t your thing maybe you’d want to check out Shadowrun, a cyberpunk, Blade Runner-esque, dystopian future tabletop roleplaying game. Or perhaps horror and the occult is your thing. Then you might want to check out Call of Cthulhu. Do you like Doctor Who? Firefly? Supernatural? Star Trek? Star Wars? All of these have tabletop RPG adaptations. I love walking into a game store and seeing a long wall with boxes full of hundreds of different tabletop RPGs.
The options are limitless. As a GM, you can create any kind of game you want, and as a player, you can create and play as any kind of character you want. I find it to be the true perfection of gaming that video games will never surpass. (until we have virtual or artificial intelligence that is…) If you want to try Dungeons and Dragons, Cartooning Club will be having a D&D day at a date to be specified later where you can sample the rich chocolaty goodness of a tabletop RPG.
