Outside of making music, my biggest creative outlet for the last five or so years has been what I’m going to call “roleplaying stories”. It’s a name which hopefully circumvents association with “tabletop roleplaying games” and what that signifies in the public consciousness, even though there’s still some notable overlap between the two. I’ve had friends ask about this thing I do and struggle to understand how it works, so this blog post is going to include a hopefully decisive explanation. It’s important to me, and it’s even come to influence my songwriting significantly.
This is quite a long post, but it could have been longer. I'll relate how I drifted away from the fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons after realising it didn't speak to me, playing other more enticing games, before finding complete freedom to tell my own stories with friends on our own terms. I'll put this process in historical context (it's a decades-old phenomenon) and explain my dissatisfaction with both D&D and other TTRPGS in a hopefully accessible way. I'll also describe how my group plays (almost systemless) and the kinds of stories we tell now (mostly within the realms of drama and horror, and not shying away from difficult topics).
I first picked up D&D a decade ago with a group of school friends. I played the most cookie-cutter do-gooder half-elf paladin. It sucked. Nevertheless, I returned to D&D in 2018, playing at a local nerd culture emporium as well as online. I hated the nerd store games. I didn’t like being in the company of men and boys who were either super pedantic about the rules or perpetually goofing off. Roleplaying itself — speaking and acting in character — seemed like a tertiary consideration. Everyone was there to roll dice, follow rules, kill monsters in epic ways, and act out silly power fantasies. This just seemed to be what D&D was in practice, once you’d familiarised yourself with your character sheet and spell slots. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone in my frustrations. I made a close friend who invited me to a game set in his own gonzo, pulpy, alt-history setting, using a universal system (a set of rules that can be used for any setting) called Cortex. I didn’t have to choose a race (like elf or dwarf) or a class (like wizard or rogue) or even take part in combat! I asked if I could play a big gay anthropomorphic pig who worked as a doctor and toxicologist; the answer was an enthusiastic yes, even though pig-men hadn’t previously been established as existing in the world. Lazarus the pig-doctor was good fun, and the story was too, involving mostly convoluted political and criminal intrigue in a fantastical 18th(?)-century Rome. No dungeon-crawling or goblin-smashing. On that note: one of the recent 2024 amendments to D&D seems to have been the removal of intrinsic racial bonuses and moral alignments. I guess they finally figured out that making orcs statistically less intelligent beings inclined towards evil while also capable of procreation with humans was VERY BAD! Took them long enough.
I still continued to play D&D online with a group of friends (mostly other trans women) I’d met through Tumblr. Some of us were already chafing at the restraints of the system. We found the lengthy combat encounters tedious and were far more interested in how our characters bonded with each other, as well as the potential for horror scenarios (more on that later). In the final game of D&D I played (2019), the relationship between my PC (player character) and another PC became a particular focus. One was a depressed, eternally carousing half-vampire wizard whose wife had taken the kids in the divorce; the other was a depressed, eternally carousing half-elf rogue whose awful father wanted her to spy for the enemy kingdom, while she just wanted to fulfil the naive dream of being a detective. Our GM (game master) became concerned that these two PCs were straying into some psychosexual, quasi-incestuous territory with each other, something we had neither intended nor considered! But the slow-burning ambiguity of their relationship and what they represented to each other was leagues more interesting to us than whatever quest they had been reluctantly roped into. We just wanted to converse as those two characters for hours. The game fell apart for quite a different reason (which I won’t get into), but it helped refine the direction we wanted to go in with roleplaying. That other player has been my partner, both romantically and creatively, for almost six years now.
Our struggles to escape from D&D were by no means new. In the few years after the 1974 release of D&D's 1st Edition, a schism had begun to open up within the Fantasy Role-Play (FRP) community. Different players wanted different things out of their games, and typologies were being drawn up to describe these desires and methods of play. The main Manichaean dualism was between the powergamers/wargamers (PG/WG) and the storytellers/roleplayers (ST/RP), using the terminology of game designer and theorist Glenn Blacow:
Powergaming — a preoccupation with accumulating in-game power, such as levels, loot, and magic items.
Wargaming — a fair competition between GM and players which can be won using strategy.
Storytelling — a vehicle for the GM’s auteurship, in which the PCs may have limited narrative agency in the unfolding events of the world.
Roleplaying — a focus on the PCs, their lives, and their personalities, usually through acting.
While these tendencies in FRP weren’t intended to be viewed as mutually exclusive, it’s easy to see how the rift widened between PG/WG and ST/RP, especially when the two sides each considered themselves superior to the other. Wargaming/powergaming requires explicit rules and systems by necessity, while storytelling/roleplaying doesn’t, though many theorists and designers insist on mechanics that synergise coherently with the goals of storytelling/roleplaying. The ST/RP crowd began to ask questions. Why do we need dice? Why do we need rules? Why do we need combat? Why do we need fantasy/sci-fi settings? Why do we need all these quintessentially D&D things? It became apparent to some that the quality of the roleplaying group was more important than the quality of the system they were using. This was the avant-garde of a niche hobby, but D&D was a mass commercial enterprise. While you can’t sell a great friendship, you can absolutely sell rulebooks and supplemental materials; in fact, the market incentivised churning out new mechanics and lore. The first system and aesthetic you’re introduced to shapes your ideas of what TTRPGs are. Most newcomers to FRP were teenage boys who played D&D, a system which was designed for wargaming and enabled powergaming. That became the lens through which the common expectations of “tabletop roleplaying” were formed. You can see the effect of this in my teenage experiences of TTRPGS, growing beyond my initial conservative preconceptions and brushing up against the powergamers and wargamers in pursuit of actual roleplaying and interesting stories.
D&D’s 5th Edition was something of a paradigm shift when it was published in 2014. In the 2010s, it became kind of cool to be a nerd, arguably. Marvel properties and Game of Thrones were mainstreamed. The potential consumer base for D&D enlarged rapidly. 5E, it has been said, tried to be everything for everyone, and thus became an incoherent, disappointing mess for seasoned players. But, as always, there were newbies who desperately wanted to experience D&D — the legendary nerd activity par excellence — without necessarily yet having the secure knowledge of what kind of experience they wanted. The popularity of “actual play” shows like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone — finally monetising great friendships parasocially — went some ways to precondition a desire for ambitious storytelling and roleplaying in new consumers, but the expectations for wargaming combat sticking to the rules-as-written persisted, and vanilla 5E was ill-equipped to service any of these things competently. Having invested time in learning the rules of 5E, many players didn't want to learn how to play another system and instead tried to use the 5E system for whatever kind of story in whatever setting they want. This still happens, unfortunately. I was one of the seeming minority who broke away from D&D. After Cortex, my next stop was Vampire the Masquerade’s 5th Edition.
D&D has a limited capacity for horror. Even though there are some horrific entities like mind flayers in the Monster Manual, the implicit assumption is that the party of adventurers will be able to fight and vanquish any adversary they encounter. The game is set up for empowerment rather than the terror of vulnerability, agency over powerlessness, mastery over the Other rather than surrender to it. But we still tested the limits using "homebrew" ideas. In the first D&D game I ran as a teenager, my players (all low-level) ran into a maze where they were hunted by a seemingly invincible monster shrouded in magical darkness that cried like a baby and disappeared whenever it was touched. The fear of the unknown — what it looked like, why it was there, what it was capable of, if it could even be killed — genuinely unsettled my players. In my partner’s epic campaign, one PC was afflicted with terrible itching after returning from a fungal forest, to the point where she began hallucinating that her arm was decomposing; cue an unforgettable scene in which every other PC fought to prevent their friend from amputating her own arm. This involved some roleplaying on the player’s part, readily acting out the delusion rather than resisting it out of a desire to “win” or retain her power.
The most notable early horror TTRPG was Call of Cthulhu, and it’s still relatively popular. Each player goes in with the expectation that their PC will inevitably die or succumb to madness — there’s even a Sanity stat to track this descent — so the masochistic pleasure is in how their story unfolds, how their investigation into the unknown will lead to their doom. While Vampire the Masquerade has a similar mechanical doom in the Humanity stat, it proved to be one of the least impressive parts of the system (I won't get into the nitty gritty of dice pools and probability curves). One of my favourite things about VtM’s 5th Edition specifically was the Hunger mechanic. Just existing as a vampire means getting hungrier every night, especially if vampiric powers are used. Every point of Hunger makes your character more likely to succumb to bestial urges — "Compulsions" — and the system demands that you play this out rather than resisting it. Even if their character fails to accomplish a task, a player is rewarded with the opportunity to roleplay how deliciously horrific the fallout is.
It made sense that I'd end up playing Vampire. When it first came out in 1991, it gained a reputation for attracting more women, goths, and queer people to game stores and conventions, and it was very popular as a LARP (live-action role-play, but that's another story). My first vampire (2020) was a freelance photographer living in Arctic Norway called Manya. Manya’s one of my dearest characters, and there’s so much I could say about her and how she’s changed over the years, but I’ll stick to the minimum context required for this anecdote. Manya had struggled immensely with emotional regulation since childhood, which meant she was a target for bullying while also prone to lashing out herself. Her very first failure as a freshly turned vampire was brutal. On returning to her family home, she failed to sneak past her eldest brother, who was in the kitchen, sobbing and drinking to forget his problems. A consequence of this failure was an uncontrollable burst of hunger and anger. She attacked her brother savagely, retribution for years of bullying, and sunk her fangs into his skin. It was only afterwards, sated by his death but now as drunk as he was, that she saw her kid sister Katia frozen in horror at the foot of the stairs. We can’t even remember what Manya said to Katia, who’d been at the receiving end of Manya's mood swings all her life; perhaps the words tumbled out incoherently as her system fought against the torrent of horror, guilt, catharsis, and heartbreak to try to provide any explanation or reassurance. She fled the house through the snow and never saw her family again. After experiencing the sheer intensity of that scene — soundtracked, it must be added, by Boards of Canada's "Gyroscope" — I knew I would NEVER go back to D&D.
Returning to the nerd emporium one Halloween night out of morbid curiosity, I saw how radically different our group’s approach to Vampire was from that of the typically PG/WG patrons. To start with, there were about seven players assembled with one GM; in our stories, we never exceed four players, and have sometimes run sessions or whole stories for one or two players. Each player had brought along or hastily constructed a PC for the GM to insert into whatever scenario he had in mind, which resulted in an absolute mess of a session in which, as far as I could tell, nothing happened to explore character or further a plot. The PCs were all shallow caricatures, the most undignified being a vampire who was turned as a pubescent girl: her “mental age” was an insufficient excuse for how sexualised à la Harley Quinn she was. The session was an enormous goof-off. By contrast, our group (and we’re not alone in this) has a planning phase before each story. Usually, the GM will pitch an idea for the kind of story they want to tell: the setting, the tone, the ideas they want to explore, and the kinds of characters they want as protagonists. If the players are inspired by this pitch, they will work with the GM to create a character they both feel excited to see in motion. Occasionally, one of us might be so inspired by a specific character that we decide to pitch a story with that character in mind as a protagonist. I have, at times, gone overboard designing characters, writing tens of thousands of words in first-person perspective to discover their history and psychology (which of course condition each other). Either way, the GM will then continue to prepare the story with the PCs firmly in mind, responding to both their public lives and their inner lives, and agreeing with the players on specific places and NPCs their PCs are familiar with. The GM sets up some dominoes to get the action moving, and then the rest of the story (however long it takes) is mostly a process of discovery, with each player and the GM pushing it in directions they find most emotionally and conceptually compelling. It’s all firmly in the ST/RP mode of play.
Believe it or not, the crazy little vampire girl wasn’t the most offensive part of the nerd emporium session. Vampirism is often used as an analogy for rape and abuse of power. There's a dark eroticism to the vampire’s penetrating kiss, the bliss and/or pain it arouses in the victim as their life is slowly drained, and by extension their power to influence and control the mind. Part of the enduring popularity of vampires lies in their sexiness and their horrificness, which are more often than not bound up in each other. I don't think this position is controversial. One of the male PCs in the nerds’ game had a female “sire” (the vampire who turned them), who exerted some degree of supernatural influence over their “childe”. This involved using the PC for sexual gratification. Though it was only alluded to in a moment when she dragged him down to her dungeon, it was deliberately played for laughs. I was appalled and left the nerd emporium soon afterwards. I was tired of being around Warhammer miniatures and Funko Pops anyway. It was a sobering reminder of how sexual violence against men is often ignored, ridiculed, or dismissed as preposterous, especially when perpetrated by women. In our group’s third Vampire story (2021), the protagonists discovered that an acquaintance of theirs was being sexually abused by his university professor. The professor herself, it eventually turned out, was enthralled to a powerful elder vampire, who had ordered her to commit these abuses so he could feed on the victims. Our PCs deliberated over how to put an end to this abhorrent situation, but then one of them took action behind everyone’s back, conspiring to kidnap the professor and extract a confession out of her. It was only in the aftermath of the plan’s execution and the professor's murder that they began to regret their actions: the victimised student felt an even deeper powerlessness and was at his wits’ end. It was left chillingly ambiguous to what the extent the professor had been supernaturally compelled to act against her will. The narrative arc had become a subversion of “rape & revenge”, specifically showing the shortcomings of avenging violence with vigilante violence and the dangers of not prioritising the agency of the victim. It also challenged the ingrained TTRPG instinct to uncritically Be The Hero. Members of our group had been subjected to sexual violence in the past, and so this story was meaningful to us.
It probably sounds like our stories are nothing but miserable traumafests, but rest assured there’s also plenty of sweetness and humour, both in- and out-of-character. We enjoy moments of relative calm in which characters can just hang out, blow off steam, get closer to one another. We also don’t shy away from letting relationships between characters get complicated or messy. If there’s interpersonal tension, maybe it’ll be resolved through difficult conversations or with experience, or maybe it’ll escalate to a point of no return. All of the above applies to sexual relationships between characters too: we’re comfortable getting explicit without “fading to black”, though we’re judicious about what’s compelling enough to warrant indulging in the details. One of our most memorable and emotional stories involved a married woman's secret lesbian affair and the increasing strain it put on her family; it birthed the tongue-in-cheek response "we're trying to roleplay a divorce" whenever someone asked what our group does. Ultimately, we like to place human relationships first and let them drive the narrative, along with the structural changes to the environment beyond the PCs’ control. What’s important to note, however, is that the breadth of social interaction and conflict in our stories is rarely dictated by mechanics or dice rolls.
I personally can’t stand when a TTRPG mechanises social interaction. I don’t want the outcome to be determined by a dice roll, regardless of how the bonuses or penalties reflect the context. I want to role-play and let all the psychosocial nuances of the situation express themselves. My partner tried playing Masks — a game about teenage superheroes which uses the popular Powered By The Apocalypse system — and hated it. One thing that seems to be fairly common across PBTA games is the categorisation of different social actions a character can make, different mental conditions they’re in, different relationships they have, and all of these things have specific mechanical effects. "I'm going to use the Shut Someone Down move on my Rival bond to gain a String on them and resolve my Pissed Off condition, but they also gain Experience". Ugh! I don’t like how the implicit encouragement is to role-play/story-tell in prescribed ways in order to gain quantitative mechanical benefits. I especially don’t like how you know the outcome (or spread of possible outcomes) ahead of time. There’s a cold detachment to this gamification of the social, even the sexual or traumatic in some cases. It foregrounds the quantitative rather than qualitative values of these things, which leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. For me, roleplay isn’t a means to an end; it’s a pleasure in and of itself. While I understand these different re-skins of the PBTA system are designed to create a specific kind of narrative within a specific setting, they all feel like guided experiences that anchor players to mechanics, even more than D&D does, in a way. It was common knowledge in the 70s that nobody played D&D by the rules-as-written, but you sort of have to play by the rules with these modern story-games to get an experience in line with the designers' intentions. To me, the result of an overly mechanised roleplaying/storytelling system is a rigidly structured session that feels like following flowcharts and making numbers go up and down, rather than an organically evolving session shaped by personal judgements and impulses. I’d personally rather not have my hand held and my horizons limited.
After exploring the possibilities of Vampire the Masquerade and Mage the Ascension — and wasting far too much time on LANCER, which we grew to loathe with every fibre of our beings — we decided to tell stories using our own extremely minimal and ultimately ignorable systems. My initial spark of inspiration in 2023 was a sort of synthesis between House of Leaves and Paradise Rot, which I had recently read back to back. The story would take place in a fictional coastal town in Norfolk, in the Autumn of 1999. Each PC would inhabit the same ten-storey apartment building, in which the action would primarily take place, and most NPCs would be other residents. I reckoned that everyone being in close proximity to each other would keep the story tight and claustrophobic. I also provided a list of other prospective influences from books, films, music, and life experiences, to help give some direction for PC creation… though "re-creation" or "re-iteration" is often more accurate in our case. We’re very fond of reusing characters, exploring them at different ages, in different contexts, sometimes significantly altering them in some way, in order to express or discover new things within them. My dearest sisters Manya and Katia were significant NPCs in this story! But anyway, here’s a brief synopsis of the set-up:
When documentary filmmaker Daniel Lechman unexpectedly dies of lung failure, he leaves behind an archive of footage, both professional and personal. His daughter Alyssa — though he tragically never knew her as his daughter — has been following in his footsteps, working as a camerawoman for local film productions while indulging in her own private, voyeuristic video documentation. She moves into her father’s tenth-floor apartment to take custody of her teenage brother Ian, who was truant and bitter even before he discovered their father’s dead body, camcorder still in hand. Sorting through the things left behind for her, Alyssa finds a shoebox that seems to contain the final tapes that her father filmed, some of them covered in a strange orange mold, all of them unlabeled…
On the fourth floor, an architectural engineering student called Preston is making illegal modifications to his apartment — repositioning walls, blocking lines of sight, directing light with space and mirrors — necessary "corrections". Most available surfaces are covered with his endless drafts, architectural plans that often verge on the physically impossible. He avoids other people indoors and is afflicted with the constant feeling that he’s not supposed to be here. On the ground floor, a small-time cybercriminal called Beato is living on disability, sharing her apartment with an unusually reclusive man who only communicates with her via fridge magnet poetry. Her long-distance partner Jack unexpectedly turns up on her doorstep, laid off from their job at a North Sea oil rig after a horrific accident. Having never lived in close-quarters together, the future of their relationship is precarious.
Alyssa keeps the unlabeled tapes a secret from Ian and begins to watch them in her room. The footage is warped, disturbing, incomprehensible, and at times troublingly arousing for her. A bird’s-eye view of a puppet-like man blankly staring upwards while being medically inspected by a gloved individual; the door to apartment 14 being opened and the interior filled with a dense smoke; a ground-level shot of a boy playing video games, oblivious to the dark figure slowly approaching him; montages of nightwalks along the coastline; candid personal interviews with other residents. Meanwhile, Ian is concerned that his best friend Travis seems to be missing, so he enlists the help of his neighour, classmate, and secret crush Cathy to try and find him. Preston and Beato are drawn into mystery too when they both receive a purportedly cursed chain-email with an image attached of a man lying on a linoleum floor, its pattern the same as their apartment building’s. And the unforeseen arrival of a neighbour’s kid sister, having run away from their family home for undisclosed reasons, threatens to complicate everyone’s lives even further…
The story was partly weird horror, partly murder mystery, mostly drama. The conspiracy and supernatural elements were left with deliberate loose ends and ambiguities. In the end, our narrative unfolded in such a way that the main things expressed were how people close to us physically or socially can be so distant, the pains and indignities of childhood, and learning to live with death and enigmatic trauma that will never fully resolve.
I know there’s nothing more boring than someone giving you a blow-by-blow of their tabletop session, but I hope this has all been interesting and illuminating. As much as I like to badmouth D&D — and I could have gone further, believe me! — it introduced me to roleplaying, and we still follow the broad strokes of its structure. One GM still describes the world and controls its denizens, giving them significant sway over the narrative, while the players control their respective PCs, who likewise have agency to decide where the narrative goes. One recent thing we’ve started doing this year is giving the players an opportunity to decide that something happens outside of their PC’s power; this doesn’t happen every session, as we only like to use it when we have a really excellent idea. Unlike D&D, in which the party of adventurers is expected to stick together, our stories consistently allow PCs to have their own scenes, reconvening when narratively and dramatically appropriate. We rarely get bored or fed up when we’re not in a scene, as we’re invested in the story at large and the other characters. Because we’re acting, it sort of feels half like a radio play. When the stakes of the action are raised, we can choose to roll dice to determine the outcome if we think it’d be compelling to do so; there’s no rule to say dice-rolling needs to happen in certain circumstances. Right now, we just have eight skill stats, but honestly I think we don’t even need them; all that would do the trick is an informed idea of whether a character would be unusually advantaged or disadvantaged in the situation and how carefully or hastily they’re acting. We all have strong enough conceptions of our characters without recourse to a character sheet filled with numbers and Proper Nouns. I only realised two sessions into playing my latest PC that I hadn’t even made a character sheet for him! Scenes can last anything from a few minutes to over an hour, depending on what the situation calls for. And of course the GM has a playlist of music to cue up for particular scenes. My story I just described had a lot of Autechre, illbient acts like Scorn, Techno Animal, and Mick Harris side projects, and the evergreen Aphex ambience of SAW II (Chris Morris had the right idea with Blue Jam).
I don’t want to make the haughty mistake of saying this is the One True Way to do roleplaying stories. It requires a lot of work and a lot of trust, and everyone has different preferences. Some of our group even like a bit of wargaming and dungeon-crawling now and then! But this is what called to me, helped me get through tough times in my life, inspired me to push myself and stay creative, and brought me unimaginable joy and love. It might seem ludicrous to expend so much time and effort on fictions only you and your closest friends will ever experience, but that makes them even more precious. Maybe something public will come of it all. My new songs are already heavily informed by years of storytelling; storytelling informed by life; life informed by storytelling. I've barely scratched the surface in this blog post. But if this inspires anyone to try something new with their friends, get together to tell the kinds of stories they want told, even without the chops for novel-writing or the budget for film-making, that would be wonderful.