Roleplay Friday - 5 RPG Experiences To Try
The roleplaying world is becoming more and more accessible, but many gamers still maintain an outdated view of how much investment is required to try out roleplaying. It’s very likely that, with the many thematic board games that have come out in recent years, most of the tabletop community has roleplayed to some extent even if they weren’t aware of it.
So here are five roleplaying experiences that you can check out if you’re interested!
Roleplaying is one of the most immersive parts of tabletop gaming.
It can be a wholly involved experience, with players diving deep into another world and taking on the creative control of a character along with their companions. Or it can be a small but meaningful part of a different game, where it may not even register with players that they are roleplaying.
So if you’re interested in roleplaying—or just not realizing that you’re doing it already—I’ve listed some of my favorite experiences (that I’ve played or seen) so far from the last couple of years in tabletop gaming.
Escape the Dark
Escape the Dark is a series from publisher Themeborne. Starting with Castle in 2017 and continuing with Sector in 2020, it’s a fast-paced board game that brings fantasy and sci-fi themes to life with a choose-your-own-adventure style experience.
While it’s not traditionally a roleplaying game that most people would assume, it creates a lot of opportunities to slowly add your own thematic accents—one game I played was spent reading every chapter card as European crewmates attempting to escape while fighting off the aliens and other space threats in Escape the Dark Sector.
With rich world-building and gorgeous art, it’s an easy game to start slipping into roleplaying.
ALIEN RPG
This remains my favorite roleplaying experience in recent memory.
Free League Publishing is a tabletop publisher that has been batting a thousand for a while now. So many of their releases go on to win awards, but the ALIEN RPG is a terrifying and satisfying science fiction love letter to the classic film franchise.
It divides the experience into two distinct categories—traditional roleplaying campaigns and the more accessible cinematic scenarios that act as short sessions for players that don’t want a longer format or aren’t used to tabletop roleplaying.
The cinematic scenario is like playing through a movie and the preset characters allow players to just jump right in. And the Stress mechanic in the game accurately reflects the tension, dread, and kinetic action of the movies.
Inhuman Conditions
I haven’t played Inhuman Conditions yet, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would enjoy playing with certain friends in my gaming group.
It’s a Blade Runner-inspired party game where two players sit down for an interview that lasts five minutes. This is perfect for several reasons. Many roleplaying games are lengthy (especially if you start off on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign) and this super-quick timeframe immediately makes the game more approachable to hesitant players. The two-player count also means you might be able to bring this to the table a lot more than something requiring more participants. And its subtle connection to Blade Runner might intrigue non-gamer friends and family who appreciate the sci-fi reference.
But the best part? An awkward Voight-Kampff interrogation between a human investigator and an interviewee—who could either be a human or a robot…
Among Us
You may not realize it, but most social-deduction party games are also roleplaying games.
I could have listed a lot of popular tabletop games—One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Secret Hitler, Blood on the Clocktower, etc.—but Among Us was a phenomenon in 2020 so it felt right to give it the spotlight.
Whether you’re a crewmate or an impostor, your job is to convince the other players of your innocence. You must do this during each round with the movements and actions you perform, but you must also do it in-between rounds while talking in meetings. The social trickery of games like these is making a convincing argument, whether you’re telling the truth or not. You’re roleplaying as a certain individual and trying to bring others along for the ride.
Dungeons & Dragons
You can substitute Dungeons & Dragons here for any traditional roleplaying game and core system, but the name is synonymous with RPGs.
My wife and I are currently playing through Curse of Strahd with some friends and are having a blast. The wonderful thing about roleplaying is that it’s easy to play over video chat, which is helpful with a pandemic raging outside in the world, so if you’re interested in roleplaying more heavily than you have before, then there has never been a better time. It’s definitely one of the social hangouts that has kept us sane while shuttered inside so much.
Curse of Strahd in particular is an engrossing narrative adventure that involves vampires, werewolves, and many other shadowy creatures that threaten to tear adventurers apart. It’s a boatload of fun!
I encourage you all to explore and research the kind of tabletop roleplaying world that will get you playing, though!
What roleplaying games have you played? Are there any board games where you’re roleplaying but you just didn’t realize it? Let us know in the comments!