Been thinking about this & putting it into practice when writing The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwickfor a while: thanks to the ever excellent @babblegumsam (who you are probably already following and if not now is your chance to rectify that) for the final straw that made me write this up today. I truly believe if you have any interest in TTRPGs, play, or design you’ll get something out of it, it’s a further 5.4 mins read from here on out.
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Play is interaction.
Reading is interaction.
Below I will argue the necessity & usefulness of thinking the relationship between reading & play in TTRPGs as (almost) the exact same thing to unlock a wide & deep potential as reader/player/designer.
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Reading & play don’t have to be the same thing. But you can’t play without reading (in the sense of reading representations, images, ideas, concepts, interactions, etc, not just written text), because then there could be no interaction.
Reading and play can both accurately describe a given act or process. For instance: I read a table or piece of prose in a TTRPG book.
I say this because this is an idea that people struggle with, and while I encourage debate around the concept, we first have to agree on some basic building blocks that I hope I’m able to communicate here. For instance, there exists a potential reality in which tabletop roleplaying games are called tabletop reading games and nothing else about them changes (except for the consequential ability to think of reading in ttrpgs as play, and the potential this tool unlocks), because the prerequisite role for all other roles being played in a role-playing game is that of the reader.
This crystallizes a lot of things I’ve been thinking about over the past year in this space and I’m glad to see other people talking about this.
For many of us (myself included) the time we can commit to getting together with other people to play TTRPGs is far less than the time we’d like to spend in the hobby. There’s a lot of ways to fill that gap, but simply reading and engaging with the text as you think through the ways it could come out in play, either through the author’s intention and/or the chaos of the table, is an underrated one.
I fill a lot of my time personally with writing and publishing games and modules now, but I also love reading what other people put out, even if only a small fraction of that makes it to my table with how little I get to actually play.
As a corollary, we should also be taking more time to talk out loud about our thoughts from reading. A lot of us end up feeling like we’re sending things out into the void, and knowing that anybody is interacting with it in any way is so valuable.
*explaining kitchen appliances to my pet medieval knights* The microwave, or Micheal the Wavious, and metal fork, or Sir Silver Prong, are sworn enemies and can never cross paths lest their meeting spell destruction for all.
ALT
