Think about the future

 

Thoughts on the Future of TTRPGs

The tabletop role-playing game stands at a peculiar inflection point in human entertainment history, simultaneously experiencing a renaissance and facing existential questions about its fundamental nature. While D&D's cultural ascendancy has brought unprecedented visibility to the medium, this popularization masks deeper currents that suggest we are witnessing not merely growth, but metamorphosis.

The democratization of game design tools has fractured the traditional publisher-consumer relationship in ways that echo broader cultural shifts. Where once Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's vision filtered through corporate gatekeepers, we now witness an explosion of independent creators leveraging platforms like itch.io to distribute highly personal, often experimental works. This proliferation has moved beyond mere mechanical innovation: it represents a fundamental questioning of what constitutes "play" itself.

Consider the emergence of what we might term "post-heroic" TTRPGs. Games that deliberately eschew conflict resolution as the primary driver of narrative tension, instead focusing on community building, seasonal change, or emotional archaeology. These works suggest that the medium is evolving beyond its wargaming origins toward something resembling interactive literature or collaborative mythology-making.

The integration of digital tools presents perhaps the most fascinating paradox. Virtual tabletops like Roll20 and Foundry have maintained the hobby's growth through global disruptions, yet they introduce questions about presence and embodiment that strike at the RPG's core appeal. The tactile ritual of dice-rolling, the physical gathering around a shared table: these elements may prove more essential to the medium's identity than previously assumed. The fact that many groups have eagerly returned to in-person play despite digital convenience suggests an almost liturgical dimension to traditional TTRPG practice.

We're witnessing the emergence of "augmented tabletop" experiences that blend physical and digital elements in novel ways. Rather than replacing human Game Masters with AI, the more sophisticated implementations use algorithmic assistance to enhance rather than supplant human creativity. This points toward a future where technology serves as an amplifier of imagination rather than its replacement.

The commodification of TTRPG culture through streaming media like Critical Role has created new tensions between authentic play and performance. While these productions have undeniably expanded the hobby's reach, they risk establishing normative expectations about "proper" play that could stifle the anarchic creativity that has always been the medium's greatest strength. The challenge lies in maintaining TTRPG's essential characteristic—its infinite malleability—while navigating commercial pressures toward standardization.

Perhaps most significantly, TTRPGs are becoming vehicles for processing contemporary anxieties in ways that other media cannot match. Games exploring themes of climate catastrophe, social isolation, or identity formation offer players agency in confronting existential concerns through metaphor and collaborative narrative. This therapeutic dimension suggests that TTRPGs may evolve into structured spaces for communities to collectively work through shared cultural traumas.

The future of TTRPGs likely lies not in technological disruption but in their ability to remain fundamentally human experiences in an increasingly mediated world. As artificial intelligence transforms other creative fields, the irreducibly social nature of tabletop gaming may become its greatest asset. The medium's capacity to generate emergent narratives through the collision of multiple human imaginations represents something that no algorithm can replicate—the beautiful unpredictability of collaborative dreaming made manifest through dice and conversation.

The tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) is, paradoxically, both ancient and perpetually new. It is a cultural artifact that, in its most fundamental sense, predates dice and character sheets—rooted in the universal human compulsion to tell stories together. Today, as we find ourselves in an era awash with digital entertainment, speculative algorithms, and mediated sociality, the fate of TTRPGs is often discussed in binary terms: analog nostalgia versus digital evolution; old-school crunch versus storygame minimalism. Yet such dichotomies obscure the truly profound possibilities that lie ahead. The future of TTRPGs, I believe, will be marked by the dissolution of boundaries  between game and not-game, between creator and participant, between fiction and reality.

The Permeable Table

Consider, first, the table itself. For decades, it has been a literal and figurative locus—a place where bodies and imaginations gather. Yet as remote play becomes normalized, the "table" becomes an abstraction: a shared imaginative space, no longer bound by geography or even temporality. Synchronous play is giving way to asynchronous, even persistent, campaigns that borrow from the language of massive multiplayer games and collaborative fiction. If the telephone and the internet have already untethered us from place, the next wave of TTRPGs may untether us from time—games played across hours, days, or even years, punctuated by moments of shared narrative decision and solitary reflection. The game's locus becomes a living, evolving document: a wiki, a chat log, a palimpsest of choices and consequences.

Procedural Storytelling, Human Meaning

Much has been made of AI-driven content generation, but the true impact of machine intelligence on TTRPGs will not be in replacing the dungeon master, but in offering new forms of procedural scaffolding. Imagine a game where the world's history is generated in real-time, reacting not only to players' actions but to their emotional investment, to the resonance of particular motifs, to the emergence of shared symbols. The AI as co-creator, not as adversary or oracle, but as a subtle hand guiding the narrative, amplifying the players' own aesthetic and thematic preferences.

Yet the essence of TTRPGs is not found in the novelty of their content, but in the meaning made by humans in concert. The future belongs not to games that tell better stories, but to games that help us tell better stories together—games that surface the latent connections between disparate ideas, that reward lateral thinking and emotional vulnerability as much as tactical cleverness.

The End of Ownership

TTRPGs have always blurred the lines between author and audience. The best campaigns are collaborative fictions, their authorship distributed, their canon endlessly mutable. The future will see this tendency radicalized: game texts as living documents, forked and remixed, with "official" settings and rules mattering less than the proliferation of house rules, community supplements, and emergent folklore. Already, mainstream publishers are ceding control, inviting players to hack, share, and reinterpret. In a few years, the notion of a "complete" game may seem quaint: every table (real or virtual) will be its own design studio, its own publishing house.

Toward the Infinite Game

To borrow from James P. Carse, TTRPGs are the quintessential "infinite game": their purpose is not victory, but continuation; not triumph, but transformation. The future of TTRPGs will be measured not by market share or media adaptations, but by their capacity to sustain communities of play, to inspire new forms of art and connection, to remind us again and again that the boundaries between reality and imagination, between self and other, are far more permeable than we suppose.

In a world increasingly defined by algorithms and attention economies, the TTRPG offers something quietly radical: a space to co-create, to listen, to imagine otherwise. The future, in this sense, is less about innovation than about remembering how to play, together, in earnest.