My Story, Your Story, Our Story: Why I fell in love with TTRPGs

Oct 2, 2022
2 min read

When it comes to TTRPGs, one can NEVER have too many dice

I played my first game of Dungeons and Dragons in high school. I went over to a friend’s house one afternoon, where a group of us gathered around a large table in his shed. We started playing at around 2pm, I made my Elven Druid and we fought giant centipedes and had a daring chase across a crumbling bridge. By the time we decided to wrap up the session, it was 6am and dawn was breaking. Even a decade later I still remember the sheer joy of that night, and I knew I had found a hobby that was going to change my life.

Sometimes running a game leads to your players trying to design an entire governmental system from scratch.

In university, I set out to run my own campaign. I didn’t know when I started that the world I would build, the characters my friends and I would create and the story we would tell together would impact my life and friendships so immensely. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but within the story and the game I was able to share, learn and grow both as a person and as a storyteller. Though my life has changed completely from where I was when I began that campaign - and from when it ended five years later - I am still connected to the story that had been told.

A highlight from an online game where my character may have accidentally set everything on fire...

I have always had an interest in storytelling. I’ve wanted to be a writer for most of my life, devoured every book I could get my hands on as a child, spending countless hours spinning grand adventures in my head. I studied drama at university, with dreams of directing plays and making theatre. When I found TTRPGs, and especially when I began to run my long play campaign, I began to experience a unique kind of storytelling: collaborative, improvised storytelling. I always enjoyed the game elements of TTRPGs, of course. It’s a wonderful feeling to get a critical success on a roll, but it’s even more wonderful when that critical success means your character is able to leap across a castle moat to land in perfect range to be able to cast a healing spell that revives all of their fallen party members and turn the tide of a desperate battle. For me, TTRPGs are about being able to experience and craft a story that is shaped by more than just yourself, that is a shared experience with people you trust, and sometimes completely derailed by something as simple as a failed dice roll at a key moment. There’s truly nothing else like it.