First and foremost, I want to be able to roleplay characters who exist in a deeply believable fantastic Otherworld. Through play, I want to be able to become immersed into the role of my character and the Otherworld to experience a strong imaginative collaboration with the other players. The purpose of the whole game is to enable roleplay.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been actively pursuing experiments with different groups of players to enact those principles which I believe will move us closer to experiencing roleplay in a more distilled or rarefied form of experience. This collaboration has been highly satisfying and revelatory not only to me but to others at the table.

On the one hand, I’ve been fortunate to have a half-dozen school students indulge me in playing a fantasy genre game wherein their characters have been described without mechanistic rules-based details. The character sheets exist but they have been brought behind the GM’s screen and the players interact purely within a descriptive framework.

With another group of adult gamers, we’ve begun to experiment with techniques that ask the player to describe action solely from the viewpoint of their character and feel free to act upon the imaginary situation including details which, although not explicitly described by the GM, exist in their mind’s eye. The arising collaborative result has been startling.

All of this experimentation has been directed towards the principle of enhancing the dialogue of play so that players can focus more on the imaginary invocation of the world and their decisions in-character. Experiencing roleplay has become the primary goal of the gaming sessions I’m running. My excitement is palpable because the games are more joyful.

Moving from theory to practice is difficult because roleplaying games as a category have become cluttered with offerings which do not, in fact, encourage or support the purpose of experiencing roleplay. It turns out that better roleplay is not a function of the rules. It is rather a goal attained through the application of a different method of play.

Where I am right now is experimenting with games built around two specific toolkits of rules but which are becoming much more deeply focused on exploring the imaginary Otherworlds we choose to evoke. As I utilise the rules I feel as though we need less from those mechanisms as the imaginary experience grows in clarity and verisimilitude.

Despite a deep sense of moving beyond my comfort zone in play, and in spite of the strong anxiety that I experience when pushing towards my goal of roleplaying more of the time at the table, the result is that I am experiencing more rewarding play while also learning to use many tools that I previously misunderstood or discounted.

All I can say is that, day by day, I am incredibly grateful to the contributions of many fellow roleplayers over many years as well as to those individuals who are either stoically tolerating my madness or generously supporting this effort – sometimes I cannot tell which but simply hope it’s the latter.

Thank you, one and all. Let’s see where the road takes us in our play.

Game on!