What first drew you to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), and what has kept you engaged with them over time?
I sort of came to role-playing games because they were somewhat forbidden.
The cartoon—Dungeons & Dragons, I think from ’83 to ’85—was a source of fascination for me, but I could only catch it intermittently. It felt unpredictable, so it was just sort of this thing that existed. There was also the toy line, and the role-playing games, and all of those things were sort of on my periphery.
My mom didn’t really understand what Dungeons & Dragons was, and couldn’t really understand the game. There was also the ‘satanic panic’ stuff going on at the same time, which gave it a bit of a “is this good for my kid?” vibe. So I didn’t have any Dungeons & Dragons toys as a kid, and she tried to prevent me from getting the role-playing materials.
I think that sort of supercharged my interest.
Eventually, I convinced a grandparent to buy me some stuff. Once my mom saw what it actually was, she was like, “Wow, this is ridiculous. Yeah, whatever. They’re books. Books are always good.”
And I think just playing and engaging with them has sustained my interest. There’s nothing quite as satisfying or exciting as an in-person role-playing game week to week. It’s this unique intersection between social interaction and storytelling—you get to hang out with friends, and you get to experience this story that you’re a part of. I think that’s really unique.
And then all of the tertiary stuff—the artwork and just the basic idea of reading imaginative work—has always fascinated me.
How have RPGs evolved over the decades, both in terms of gameplay and the communities around them?
I could talk about this forever.
There are a lot of intricate details that affect this, and my views on them are constantly changing, so I’m going to try to be brief and not arcane.
I think there’s been a vast evolution since 1974, when the first role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. They created it out of a tradition of Midwestern wargaming, and everything about that game was rooted in that community—its interests and its self-reinforcing social dynamics.
In the immediate aftermath of Dungeons & Dragons, other role-playing games tried to “fix” it, but in doing so, they also helped diversify the player base. That diversification changed the games in significant ways that became more pronounced over time. You have a game made in Wisconsin—a collaboration between a guy in Wisconsin and a guy in the Twin Cities—middle-class, white, well-educated guys with the free time to play six-hour wargames on weekends. All of those factors shaped what the early games were.
As time went on, the audience became younger, more urban, and more diverse, and the games evolved to reflect that. In the 1980s, as the audience got younger, a lot of cartoon properties were adapted into role-playing games—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even a Rocky and Bullwinkle role-playing game. Licensing was big in that era, and it helped reach people who didn’t quite understand how these open-ended games worked. They weren’t like traditional games—there were no winners or losers. That was actually part of the concern during the satanic panic era, that these games didn’t “end” and allowed you to do anything, without real moral consequences—because, of course, it’s just a game.
In the 1990s, things became much more edgy. There was influence from mature-reader, British-wave comics—Watchmen, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison—and that tone carried over into role-playing games. The goth scene also got involved with games like Vampire: The Masquerade. The audience kept shifting, and the games shifted with it.
In the 21st century, the cross-section of people playing role-playing games has become incredibly diverse. There’s much more representation, especially in terms of LGBTQ+ identities, and there’s really a game for every interest now. Where it used to be dungeon-crawling with swords and monsters, now there are games about being old ladies in a retirement home solving mysteries, or games about cooking—just about anything you can imagine. Everything gets adapted.
It’s all reflective of the huge range of interests in the community today.
RPGs have, at times, had a complicated public reputation. Do you see any parallels between how RPGs were perceived in the past and how video games have been discussed more recently?
I think perhaps, owing to the fact that it’s more remote historically, the controversy surrounding role-playing games seems quaint and almost appealing.
Video game controversies, on the other hand—early ones were tied up with gambling, and later ones with violence, often connected to real news stories. There was never really anything real about the controversies around role-playing games. There were a couple of murder cases that people tried to tie to them, but it never really stuck.
Certainly for Dungeons & Dragons, which was the main target, the controversy, as much as it was a hassle, also boosted sales and helped it become the top dog in the industry.
I don’t think it was a plague as much as—especially with video games—the proposed causal relationship between games and violence became more of an existential threat in the late ’90s, and it’s never really gone away. It still looms in a way that it doesn’t for role-playing games.
I also think role-playing games are a vanishingly small community. Even though they’re larger than ever, with millions of players, it’s still nowhere near the size of video games, card games, or board games. It’s a very small coalition of people.
Through your Vintage RPG podcast, what stories or themes have surprised you the most as you’ve explored the history of the games?
There are a couple of things. The hobbyist domination by Dungeons & Dragons is endlessly both frustrating and surprising.
Role-playing game players, by their nature, tend to be unusual, outsider types who want to do things their own way—but that often translates into playing the mainline game. So many people come into the hobby through Dungeons & Dragons, and while there is a wider world of role-playing games, the funnel into it is actually much narrower than you’d expect. Unlike other media—like horror movies, where you get in and discover this huge world to explore—the dynamics here are different.
I also think the boom-and-bust cycle in the industry is super interesting. Because it’s such a small space, and because Dungeons & Dragons plays such a huge role, it has an outsized influence on how everything works. We’re in a bit of a contraction right now—not quite a bust, but things are getting weird again after the post-pandemic highs. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly economic and not very exciting, but it’s something that’s happened over and over again.
If you look closely at the history, you can almost set your watch by it. The same patterns repeat, and the same business models tend to blow up in the same ways.
It never ceases to surprise me how the RPG hobby remains, in so many ways, a DIY space. It’s extremely community-oriented and has resisted commercialization over its five decades. Sure, it’s a business for a lot of people, but the barrier between player, customer and creator is extremely permeable. Pretty much every notable designer started out as an enthusiast. I can’t think of any other spaces, hobby or otherwise, where that is true.
What role do you think role-playing games have played in shaping broader toy and play culture?
I think that even though the overall audience for role-playing games is rather small, they’ve had a disproportionate influence on the culture of gaming and play.
You can see it directly in video games pretty early. They were both born around the same time—consumer video games and role-playing games—and almost immediately there was crossover. One of the earliest dungeon-crawling video games is Dungeons & Dragons on the PLATO system in 1976—it’s super early.
There’s something about Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games that just lends itself to being computerized. So many of the mechanics are math-based—you can see when you’re reading the rules that they could easily be automated. There’s always been a fascination with that, and RPG mechanics are everywhere in video games now, to the point that it’s hard to recognize them. Skill trees, for example, come directly from role-playing games—early ones too. The first skill tree system is probably Bunnies & Burrows in 1976. It’s crude compared to something like Civilization, but the underlying thinking is the same. Even something as basic as hit points—something we take for granted—comes directly out of role-playing games.
To a lesser degree, board games have also been influenced. There’s been an upsurge in dungeon-crawler and adventure-style games that are sort of RPG-lite—things like Gloomhaven. There’s a lot of that crossover.
In toy culture, especially in the ’80s, role-playing games were part of a larger wave of fantasy toys, which we touched on earlier, and I think that’s carried forward. Anytime you’re playing with toys and looking for rules for play, role-playing games are going to influence that, even unconsciously.
My kid plays with Plus-Plus pieces—those little interlocking plastic shapes—and he’s really into Star Wars, especially Clones vs. Droids. He would combine pieces into units and basically create his own wargame tokens, setting up big environments and playing out battles. He was systematizing it in a way that connects back to wargaming and role-playing games, and it was wild to see that happening naturally. He was too young to really know what he was doing, but it was just around him, and he picked up on it. It translated directly into his play.
It’s everywhere. It’s fascinating to see where imagination takes you, especially watching it in someone else—it’s similar, but different, and that’s always clarifying.
If someone new to RPGs wanted to explore the hobby through a vintage lens, where would you suggest they start?
Well, I happen to have written a book about them—Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It’s a decade-by-decade, product-by-product guide. I won’t call it a history—it’s more like a guide to role-playing games. It’s also kind of a stealth memoir, so you’re getting my impressions of the importance of these things to me and to the wider culture. Sort of a retrospective. It’s a big book with lots of pictures.
I also recommend Jon Peterson’s book—actually, it’s a two-parter now, Playing at the World—which is a real deep dive into the history. You’ll get the full picture of the early days, especially the transition from wargames to role-playing games.
Aaron Trammell’s The Privilege of Play is a huge eye-opener in terms of how the early community and their backgrounds shaped the hobby moving forward.
If you’re interested in game recommendations or how to find something that suits you, there really is a game for everyone. You can go to VintageRPG, type in a search term, and see what you find.
As an all-purpose, classic Dungeons & Dragons-style game, I’d recommend Shadowdark, which is based on the current fifth edition rules but stripped down and made more user-friendly and fast playing. Old-School Essentials is another—it polishes up an older version of Dungeons & Dragons and makes it faster and more playable. Both deliver that dungeon-crawler experience.
But there’s also a huge range of other games. There’s one called Brindlewood Bay, which is essentially a combination of The Golden Girls, Murder, She Wrote, and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a mystery game with a cult secretly behind everything, and the interesting thing is that the mysteries are “quantum”—there’s no fixed solution. The players determine the outcome through play.
I really can’t stress enough—if you’re at all interested in role-playing games, there’s a huge community of people making things. There are free PDF games online, a whole zine scene with inexpensive printed games, and everything from small indie projects to larger productions. Every kind of experience is out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Visit the VintageRPG website to read more about the genre and listen to the podcast.