I was leaning back in my chair, nursing my non-alcoholic beer, trying to work out which nearby conversation to join—and whether serving myself sneaky seconds of the vegetable pasta was socially acceptable at this particular dinner party—when I heard her say it:

“Oh, you know, actually, I totally know a blacksmith! It seems like such a hard craft, but the other day he was saying that the—”

I looked down the length of the table just in time to see it, the look of horror and sudden blush as she cut herself short. Then, after a pause, quiet, embarrassed: “actually, wait, never mind”.

It had happened again: she’d confused the events of a recent Dungeons & Dragons game with real life. She doesn’t “know a blacksmith”; she just role-plays an imaginary bard, once a week, and that bard is friends with an imaginary blacksmith. She doesn’t have a blacksmith friend named Frederick, with a slight hearing problem and a difficult ex-husband and a soft German accent, because I play Frederick. And Frederick doesn’t exist.

I’ve been running a regular Dungeons & Dragons game for over four years now. Over time, it’s become a sprawling ‘sandbox’ simulated world for almost two dozen friends. There are small groups and solo players, each with their own ambitions and varying level of engagement; all acting in the same fictive universe. I relish my role as the Dungeon Master. I love the combination of improv and intricate simulation. I love the sense that there are rules to a social interaction. I love the freely-consented-to control that sitting behind a Dungeon Master’s screen affords me. I love the sheer amount of happiness that I can generate for friends, simply by throwing a handful of dice and being persnickety in my application of an arcane system of rules.

But every time I see a player confuse the Real for the Imagined—and some variation of this happens a lot—I’m a little confused by the thing that the game has become.

I’ve had players cry openly at the table, or get so anxious that I called a time-out to prevent their spiral into a full-blown panic attack. In one solo game, over a video call, a player roleplayed a long conversation in which her character forgave her estranged (fictional) father on his deathbed. Only later did she tell me that she was estranged from her real-life father, that he’d been abusive when she was young, and that she’d heard (second-hand) that he was sick. I’ve also watched players build silly small businesses in the game, over a period of months, or spend hours running difficult consensus meetings—never once breaking character—in order to generate intricate plans. Some of those plans were generated in the hopes of overcoming otherwise-deadly challenges in ruined temples that I’d designed. At other times, though, I felt like a spectator, or a voyeur: plans generated in the hopes of effecting subtle changes in the simulated world, the imagined consequences of which neither player nor character would survive to see.

Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious to me that a D&D game is the most ‘real’ part of a given player’s week. The imagined events in the Saturday game are what they’ll remember most clearly from an entire week of their lives. Other times, they’re just letting off steam. They smile as I describe their sword blade sliding between the ribs of a monster they’ve hunted for weeks, and I can tell that they’re finally not thinking about the thing their shitty boss said the day before. In either case, when the real sun sets and I put away my dice, they seem more peaceful than they did when we started playing.

I’ve quoted David Graeber before, on Dungeons & Dragons:

D&D, as its aficionados call it, is on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything, within the confines of the world created by the Dungeon Master, with his books, maps, and tables and preset towns, castles, dungeons, wilderness. In many ways it’s actually quite anarchistic, since unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have what anarchists would call an “affinity group,” a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose (a quest, or simply the desire to accumulate treasure and experience), with complementary abilities (fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief …), but no explicit chain of command. So the social relations are the very opposite of impersonal bureaucratic hierarchies. However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. (293-4).

What I didn’t explore, in my earlier treatment, was my first-hand impression of what the experience of that “antibureaucratic fantasy” actually consists in, for the players partaking in it.

To my mind, the most distinctive feature of every game I’ve run is the extent to which every player is more agentic in the act of roleplaying than they are at most other points in their life. (This is as much a grim comment on modernity as it is a glowing endorsement of TTRPGs.)

Take a group of three random people with limited resources—even good friends—and ask them to handle an overbearing town mayor, a failing supply business, and a harmful criminal enterprise. In the real world, most people wait for someone else to act. Take those same friends, have them roleplay a more extreme version of the same situation. All of a sudden, they’re playing to win. They’re strategic and careful. They look at each other, dump out their rucksacks, catalogue their collective resources, agree on a set of goals, and then set to work. Even and especially when a player is in a solo game—just me, describing the world and adjudicating their actions—there’s a switch that flips in the average human’s brain. All of a sudden, they’re coherent, sensible, and goal-directed.

More interesting, I think, is that when I encourage the average player to consider playing an “evil character”, their ability to be ‘agentic’ is dialled up yet further, and their sense of morality rarely suffers in the way that the word ‘evil’ would ordinarily imply. Somehow, me saying “you don’t need to role-play a hero, you can role-play a villain” doesn’t cause anyone to be villainous in the fictive sense. Instead, it causes them to be intelligent.

You ask “when and how did characters start to see themselves as separate from their own motivations?”

I don’t know. I think D&D provides a portrait of what human cognition looks like when one partly closes that gap between motivation and identity. Most of the time, I think my players would be happier if they used that style of cognition in their ‘Real Lives’. Almost all the time, I think that the world would be better if they did.

With Large Language Models, adding the phrase “let’s think step-by-step” to the prompt significantly improves performance in zero-shot reasoning tasks.

D&D is, perhaps, a context in which the phrase “let’s think step-by-step” is a Schelling Point amongst everyone at the table.

Much of the modern Real World is, perhaps, a context in which one is socially rewarded for groaning theatrically at the first person to utter the phrase.