I only took up tabletop roleplaying games in the past year or so, starting with a game of Pathfinder in December of 2016 on winter break, and then really began playing it on the regular the summer of 2017. I had read about it on the internet, and the genre’s impact on video gaming and modern fantasy literature, and about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s that had this sort of game declared a tool of the Devil himself. However, being born in 1996 I was raised on electronic games, on consoles or on personal computers. Hence, pen-and-paper roleplay seemed rather outdated to me in my younger years, when other worlds could be brought to life in all their glory using modern technology.

However, as I played campaigns with a group that included my oldest friend, also the dungeon master, a friend from middle school, and a coterie of assorted others from my home county who had either gone to my high school or its rival to the north. I knew some of them in passing or had met them at other social functions. Here, we had created our own characters and were plunged into an adventure.

As we went on through the city of Waterdeep and the Sunless Citadel, it struck me how much like a video game this was. We the players fulfilled the same role players of a video game would, inputting commands into the game world. The key difference was the Dungeon Master, who was not an impersonal collection of programs but a living, breathing human who used dice rather than random number generators. And he was flexible, improvising scenarios to fit our manic whims, like walking into hell at a moment’s notice for no other reason than because we could.

And that is something no computer can do perfectly like he did.

Sure, we have computers that can procedurally generate worlds, but can they write dialogue? Create characters? I doubt it. My group modernized the format a tad, using laptops connected to Roll20 in place of old-style game mats, but the spontaneity was the same.

What pen and paper roleplay offers nowadays is sheer imagination and sheer flexibility. Here, the possibilities are literally endless, not beholden to lines of code. It is slower, yes, but that is the tradeoff, and how geeks of previous decades undertook their adventures. This sort of thing allows whole worlds to be created and without a degree in computer science.