Lately I’ve become quite a fan of tabletop role playing gaming. Not too long ago, I was gaming twice per week, but things have understandably slowed down since the baby arrived. Now I’m playing once or twice each month, with some of my games on hold until the baby can be vaccinated. I play with two groups of friends, and both rotate GM duties to spread the load; sometimes the same party and setting will be split between a couple of us, in other cases, the GM has their own world. Most of it is D&D 5e, but we’ve branched out a bit into other systems.
TTRPGs seem to be popular in gemspace, with a couple people posting game content and ideas pretty frequently. Here are just two recent examples plucked from Antenna:
Alex Schroeder's Gridmapper is a dungeon drawing tool
Idiomdrottning shared details and history about her gaming experience
Why are Gemini users fans of TTRPGs? The lazy answer (“niche computing and TTRPGs are both geek hobbies”) probably isn’t entirely wrong. But I suggest that it goes a bit deeper than this. You see, people have been playing dice games for millennia, and telling stories even longer — and at the end of the day, gaming is just telling stories with dice. Of all of my hobbies, this is the one I can picture myself doing in any future that I can imagine, from the most miserable dystopias to the rosiest utopias (cooking too, but that feels like a “chore” as often as it feels like a “hobby”). I think this appeals to a lot of people here.
I love that you don’t really need anything to play. Algorithmic advertisers have figured out that I play and try to sell me fancy dice and minis, but you don’t need any of that. Just one set of dice or another way to generate random numbers, a blank sheet of paper, maybe pirated PDFs or dirt-cheap indie instructions, and you’re set.