The Informant

GL is a long time tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) player with years of experience as a Game Master (a special role in TTRPGs). When I first asked about Induction Pranks in TTRPGs, GL had some time to discuss with some other members of the community before our interview.

The Text

The informant reports a few different induction pranks and common shared experiences that qualifies someone as a member of the TTRPG community, distinctly differentiating two sets between GMs and players. For Game Masters, the common experience is dealing with the first problem player, a whole subset of narrative genres emerging from this experience can be found on the subreddit r/RPGHorrorStories. The informant cites chaotic and evil player characters, which is a distinct tradition of D&D alignment stemming from Original Dungeons and Dragons. When he exchanges stories with other GMs, while telling success stories can be fun, tales of how terrible a particular player was to work with is an effective way of relating to each other. For players, while the informant reports that the community is generally averse to gatekeeping in recent years due to the nerdy and niche reputation and history the game has, he recounts how older players in the OSR community will put new players through the “death funnel,” a meat grinder dungeon that will kill several player characters to get the player accustommed to the brutal game style of older games. We discussed how this reflects a cultural shift in the TTRPG landscape in the modern age where players become more attached to their characters and think of themselves as the hero of the story whereas older D&D is more about the dungeon crawl, with any given character not expected to live through the story.

We then talked about unique signifers of the TTRPG player identity, such as maps and miniatures, which led to our discussion of how conversely, despite being a “tabletop” game, most TTRPGs can be played without a map or grid or any miniatures at all with the “theater of mind,” which we agreed was very unique to TTRPGs as wargames tend to rely on a grid or map and the miniature sets. Extending from that, we discussed how owning a set of dice can identify a TTRPG player, particular the 20-sided dice, which is hardly ever used for any other game and iconic to D&D. If someone owns a cohesive themed set of dice from 4-sided to 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20, then that is a sure certain sign of a TTRPG player. In a way, the moment a player buys their own set of dice instead of borrowing someone else’s indicates a commitment and thus induction to the community. The other example he talked about was creating one’s own first character, which players nowadays are more likely to be attached to as mentioned earlier. Even though the character may never be played in an actual game, a TTRPG player can likely be identified by their excitement to share their character ideas, character sheet build, or even stories involving that character from a game.

Analysis

This was a particularly interview as the informant came prepared, giving a blason populaire about his own ingroup of fellow GMs and particularly problematic players who play chaotic and evil characters, citing a specific experience that identifies a particular community. Older players also have an “induction prank” for newer players when playing older systems to shatter their idea of TTRPGs before welcoming them to the experience, but it’s also interesting to note that this hobby doesn’t try to gatekeep newcomers with anything that could be qualified as hazing. Aside from the “death funnel” and Gary Gygax’s Tomb of Annihilation dungeon designed to kill player characters, we both thought of a particular video as an another example of this “induction prank” in D&D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBmNThMZJ1U

“Off record,” he joked that the real hazing is letting new players play 5th edition (a particularly divisve version of the game he dislikes but is otherwise a popular gateway game), but he notes that many other players in the community would disagree with the sentiment of the joke. Noting the uniqueness of TTRPG dice sets, a rite of passage presents itself in the form of buying the first set of dice, an example of Stuart Hall’s reception with the expression of community membership identity performance via consumerism. We laughed about how cheap it is to actually buy a dice set (you can get like a pack of 10 sets of 5 dollars), but at the same time, nobody else would bother with buying such a set of dice.

Less materialistic indications of membership are player characters, where a newcomer exploring the hobby might borrow a prebuilt character while TTRPG players committed to the hobby will not only have the knowledge to build their own characters but be actively invested in them as a proxy of themselves that they would like to roleplay as. In a sense, this is akin to a fantastical identity localized within this particular hobby or at a particular table, and modern players who focus more on the epic narrative of a band of heroes on an adventure invested in the safety and prosperity of their characters as an extension of the performed identity of the self. This is comparable to the process of an initiation ritual for community membership.