Tabletop Roleplaying: Analog Lessons for a Digital World

Baldur's Gate 3 and the Boundaries of Computer Roleplaying

LEAN ON ME

You know, it really wasn’t so long ago that the popular imagination considered tabletop roleplaying à la Dungeons & Dragons to be solely the domain of flabby, heathen ultra-nerds. Nowadays, though, live play series enjoy fanbases of millions while new tabletop roleplaying products are commercialized to great fanfare practically every week. And most of this took place even before Baldur’s Gate 3 reminded some twenty million video gamers — and ten times as many non-gaming shareholders — that roleplaying games are actually pretty great.

In my capacity as Substack’s foremost analyst of arthouse shooter design and interactive power fantasies starring Vin Diesel, I maintain a vested interest in the goings-on of the analog roleplaying community — I consider game design to be an artistic medium in its own right, and I think some of the form’s greatest triumphs over the past decade originated on the tabletop (e.g., Mothership RPG and Heart: The City Beneath) or at least owe it a profound debt of gratitude (e.g., Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and, of course, BG3).

I’m currently a little over halfway through what will be my first full playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, which of course has me thinking a lot about the current state of computer roleplaying and how it intersects with the ever-growing tabletop scene. The short version is that I think they’re bound more closely now than ever before, which is starting to reveal some fascinating insights into the limits and potential of the form at large. More on that in a bit.

First, though, I figured I’d pre-aestheticize said remarks with a story about one of my most memorable gaming sessions. Let me set the scene for you. Real names are elided for what are presumably obvious reasons.

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It was early 2017, late in the evening. Sunken into a couch at an acquaintance’s place, I lay alone, bored and numb. I strained to remember why I had come there, but the attempt was frustrated by the dense, sludgy plaque of SSRIs and nicotine salts that had accumulated amongst the folds of my grey matter. Not a very edifying spectacle for a young student of informatics, but no less than exemplary when compared to the states of some of my peers.

Presently, some of my peers entered the room in a real state. We’d been only briefly acquainted, but knew one another’s vibes by reputation. One lad — let’s call him “Dumpty” — was carrying a shrink-wrapped box in his left hand and a nearly exhausted jazz cigarette in his right. The other — we’ll call him “Droopy” — was using both hands to convey a raw frankfurter from which a big, greedy bite had been taken. He gyrated and stumbled as his cockeyed gaze lazily tracked across the room, momentarily meeting my own before returning to the hunched figure of Dumpty. The latter spoke to me through a toothy grin.

“Yo Trip, we just got this at Barnes & Noble. You should DM for us,” he said, holding up the box. I recognized the artwork: an official Fifth-Edition Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. Dude must have inferred that, as a student of software engineering, I was most likely an excellent Dungeon Master. Obviously, he was correct.

I once again met Droopy’s long, hollow stare. See, in addition to the fundamentals of computer science, my first go at college taught me a valuable lesson in neurobiology: when a man’s bloodstream contains more codeine than oxygen, his brain will tend to abandon rationality, defaulting instead to free association and the pursuit of unrestrained whim. This would definitely be worth a few anecdotes. While they selected pre-filled character sheets, I skimmed through the included Adventure Module and made adjustments to accommodate a group of only two player characters.

Above: The set in question. I doubt it’s still for sale. Say, do people even still play with 5e rules outside of Baldur’s Gate 3? And while I’m at it, do college kids even still abuse cough suppressant now that trap music is in decline?

A couple of hours passed. I was midway through a piss-flavored domestic lager. Dumpty was midway through his fourth. Droopy, on a harsh comedown and unable to withstand the dysphoric stoning of antihistamine toxicity, was taking fat rips from a dab rig every few minutes and had become even less coherent. To this point, I’d managed to keep the pair more-or-less on track with the adventure by contriving reasons for story figures to appear by coincidence, generally by having them follow rumors of the players’ roguish antics. To guide them toward a quest-important MacGuffin, I assumed the character of one such, playing coy with its location. The players conferred a moment, then elected to bribe him with not only money, but the entire contents of their bags. I decided that this would suffice.

“The guildmaster is responsible for the item’s protection, but he hid it down the old well when he heard you two were coming,” I said, in character.

“I JUMP INTO THE WELL,” insisted a thoroughly excited Dumpty, unprompted. A wry smile crept onto my face.

“With a hero’s courage, you boldly leap into the disused well, unconcerned with whatever awaits you at the bottom of its fifty-foot shaft,” I answered, grinning devilishly as he mouthed some vain protest. I rolled an acrobatics skill check, and the twenty-sided die read a seventeen. Drat. My smile receded.

“Seventeen, plus two from your DEX score. You bounce chaotically between the shaft’s walls, slowing your descent. Your fall is ultimately broken by a pile of glistening manure, from which protrudes [the MacGuffin, whose goofy name I can’t remember]. However, the walls are too slick to climb. You are trapped.”

Then Droopy caught me totally off-guard.

“I tie my mace to uh end of the well rope and throw it down,” he replied. I flashed a bemused expression, but decided to roll with it instead of asking why he thought this was a remotely good idea.¹

“Sounds like a dexterity check to me. Your modifier’s plus-one, yeah?”

“Uh, yeah. Man, howdja lurn alldeez rules?”

“One sec, gotta focus,” I responded, needlessly casting all six of my dice in a vainglorious display of cognitive dominance. The d20 read a 1. Critical Failure. Awwww yiss.

“You aim for an unoccupied region of the manure patch, but are distracted by a passing bunny rabbit and botch the throw. The head of the mace strikes Dumpty square in the jaw for…” I rolled a six-sided die, ready to double the result in appeasement of the d20’s fickle will.

“…twelve damage. His head explodes in a torrent of wet, stinking gore.”

A few moments passed in complete silence, and then both of them simultaneously burst out laughing. After a few moments more, so did I. We decided to call it a night at that point — I was the only one left with any unspent neurotransmitters, and we weren’t about to top that story.

BG3 AND THE NOUMENA OF THE TABLETOP

You see, there’s something very special about Larian Studios’ Divinity Engine, the game engine powering Baldur’s Gate 3 and the preceeding Divinity: Original Sin titles. These are grand CRPGs² of the highest order and are popularly recognized as such for good reason: no other engine has come so palpably close to reproducing the unique intangibles of tabletop RPG problem-solving, and BG3 represents the current zenith of the phenomenon. Let me try to explain what I mean by way of example. Minor spoilers for a well-known puzzle from Act 1 ahead — if you can’t bear even that, feel free to skip over the next two paragraphs and pick up from there.

Deep within the Rosymorn Monastery, which many but not all players will visit during BG3’s first Act, a valuable treasure lies hidden and may be sought by an intrepid party. There are plenty of obstacles to overcome before reaching it, but the one that interests me the most is an impenetrable stone gate flanked by two gigantic statues. Any player, provided they are remotely engaged, will quickly observe that the statues are built on rotating platforms such that they may pivot about their vertical axes — the gate opens when they’re correctly oriented. One statue rotates freely, but the other is jammed. Almost all players will fail the extremely difficult athletics check to force it. So… load up a save and try again, right?

Wrong! Those whip-smart Dungeon Masters at Larian have us covered. The mechanism can be lubed up to fix the jam altogether, or it can be shifted in spite of the jam by powerful attacks. The former can be accomplished by chemical or magical means, and the latter by virtually any directed source of kinetic energy that the player can bring to bear. Two solutions to an RPG puzzle might not sound like a lot, and it isn’t. But these options constitute far more than two solutions: “grease it up” and “hit the thing really hard” could collectively involve dozens of discrete actions available to a Baldur’s Gate 3 player, but any given player need only realize one of them in order to proceed without a walkthrough.

Crucially, “hit the thing really hard to fix the problem” is very easy for a developer to program, but quite difficult for a player to directly intuit. This is a good thing: if Player A decides to hit it with a hammer and Player B decides to cast a force-imparting spell, they’ll tend to interpret the game as even more flexible than it truly is when they invariably discuss this puzzle on a forum or around the water-cooler.

Above: in lieu of a screenshot from BG3 that’d spoil the puzzle solution, please enjoy this screenshot of 1982’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for the Intellivision. We’ve come a pretty long way, huh? | Source

This is what I mean by “palpably close” to reproducing the sensation of problem-solving at a table game refereed by an experienced human Game Master. Just imagine being presented with that puzzle in a tabletop campaign — you and your party would most likely arrive at one of the solutions facilitated by the puzzle in BG3. The designers at Larian are very clearly passionate about the tabletop medium, and it shows in the thoughtful interplay between the evolved CRPG game mechanics and the TTRPG-inspired encounter design that characterize their magnum opus.

Then again, there’s a solid chance that a tabletop player would come up with an equally valid solution that the Divinity Engine couldn’t reproduce. Off the top of my head: “let’s all four of us push it at once,” or perhaps “let’s find something long and sturdy to use as a lever.” Both of those are at least theoretically possible to represent in a game engine, but either would imply a significant additional burden on production — every aspect of design, from programming to animation to balancing, would require reconsideration. Meanwhile, even a vacant, mouth-breathing dumbass of a DM could almost effortlessly facilitate any of the above at a table.

I consider this unconstrained freedom of imagination to be utterly fundamental to the tabletop-roleplaying experience, if not its centrally defining feature. To participate in a well-run TTRPG campaign around a table is to meld one’s consciousness with one’s fellows toward the shared enjoyment of a story as it is written in real-time — the accompanying sensations border on the magical. To me, immersion in a good TTRPG session is comparable to the feeling of spiritual oneness found in a sanctuary at a temple or church during a group hymn, when all the uniquely complex minds around you become singularly engrossed in shared devotion. Can you believe they used to call fantasy roleplaying satanic?

LESSONS FOR THE IMAGINATIVE GAMER

I suspect that a perfect reproduction of imagination-driven tabletop roleplaying is not possible within the constraints of modern video game development, nor even visible on the distant horizon.³ There’s a certain beauty to this state of affairs.

For one — and I’ll return to this topic in the near future — it underscores that great narrative-focused video games are made not by trying to simulate as much of reality as possible, but by doing a great job at simulating the individual aspects of reality that are most germane to the story being told. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story about an apocalyptic, world-altering conflict whose belligerants include the very gods themselves. Rather than allocating thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars getting bogged down in the depths of simulation, Larian poured most of their energy into dynamic narrativization, engaging cinematics, and robust gameplay mechanics that continuously reinforce the game throughout its hundred-hour runtime. In other words, Larian doubled down on the particular strengths of video game design as a medium of storytelling. If you ask me, this is the recipe for a billion-dollar CRPG.

No less importantly, the unique strengths of tabletop roleplaying remind us as video gamers and video game designers that stimulating the human imagination is the surest means of engaging one’s playerbase. According to common heuristics, Baldur’s Gate 3 has grossed nearly $1.9 billion at time of writing. Recall that it has done so without predatory microtransactions, gambling mechanics, infantilizing presentation, or trend-chasing gameplay. Gamers who had never before played an RPG bought the thing in droves, because the very suggestion of a grand, bespoke adventure without compromise drove sales in and of itself.

In fact, a lack of imagination might as well be the proximate cause of the AAA video gaming industry’s ceaseless tribulations of late. How else could a cultural travesty like last year’s Concord come to pass when it began its life as a promising, original IP? Hell, even Bungie’s upcoming Marathon reboot⁴ exhibits an almost hilarious lack of creative integrity despite its drawing from one of the most out-of-pocket sci-fi settings in all of video gaming. Its closed alpha test already shows ominous signs of player disengagement — I strongly suspect this reflects the distinctly unenthusiastic reception that Marathon (2025) has thus far inspired among most spectators. Why shell out for yet another derivative multiplayer extraction shooter when you could start up another playthrough of BG3 at no additional cost and get another hundred hours of novel entertainment, or indeed just play one of the already released derivative multiplayer extraction shooters?

The AAA bubble is due for a good bursting. Even the most valuable corporation can only release so many quarter-billion-dollar flops before its investors take their money elsewhere — just ask the punished husk that used to be Warner Brothers or, for that matter, Wizards of the Coast. For my money, it’s a question of when rather than if at this point. What will emerge from the smouldering wreckage of the growth-at-all-costs model of high-level game development? Given all the other strife and discord throughout the world at this moment in history, I reckon it’s too soon to tell. I can only hope that, when flaming brimstone finally starts raining upon the industry, the right lessons will be learned.

Til next time <3

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Ever played in a memorable TTRPG session? Tell me about it!

And if you’d like to read more about the philosophical character of imagination in video game design, check out this piece I wrote on 2021’s Cruelty Squad:

1. We talked about it later that week. Apparently, he’d convinced himself that the rope needed ballast in order to fall to the bottom of the well, having entirely forgotten about the concept of gravity. Don’t do drugs, kids.

2. For the uninitiated: the “C” in “CRPG” stands for “computer.” The “TT” in “TTRPG” stands for “tabletop.”

3. I’ve heard speculation that generative AI could bridge this gap, but I’m extremely skeptical. Contemporary LLMs are manifestly incapable of ad-hoc, humanlike imagination, and a theoretical AI paradigm that was so capable would probably upend entertainment media as we now understand it. I believe we’re decades away from any such thing.

4. For the uninitiated: Bungie made Destiny, the first several Halo games, and several classic MacOS games that I personally count among the more unique and interesting titles of 90s PC gaming. Marathon was one of them, and it bore essentially no resemblance whatsoever to the reboot coming out later this year.