Tabletop Role-playing Games Research Articles

On the similarities of slaying dragons and ordering food: A proposition for using a Task-Based Language Teaching Approach for playing Tabletop Role-playing Games

Background: Given their potential for language learning, TRPGs can become effective teaching tools when implemented through a pedagogic framework. Aim: To demonstrate how TRPGs and task-based language teaching could align in theory. Methods: Theoretical comparison combined with script data from a student project and exemplification through three adventures. Results: TRPGs and TBLT align in several aspects theoretically, which few projects and pedagogic plans suggest. Conclusion: To maximize the learning benefits, it is suggested to combine research in a rather fast-headed joint action-research program.

Особенности сторителлинга в настольной ролевой игре Dungeons & Dragons

The research aims to determine the features of storytelling of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game. The paper is novel in that it is the first to consider both storytelling and tabletop role-playing games through the lens of cognitive literary studies. Modern storytelling has many features of mythological-folklore communication along with the influence of written culture, which is reflected in the process of constructing a narrative in tabletop role-playing games. This process occurs simultaneously in several interconnected frames (game, narrative, social and dramatic) in the process of player communication. The players see themselves as a player, a player character and a person at the same time and interact in all the frames at once in their own way of describing and bringing the setting to life. Mythological-folklore and fantasy clichés are widely used in the game, but its uniqueness is maintained due to the very process of collaboration - prepared written text elements and oral improvisation are involved. From the viewpoint of the plot, the games are a series of quests with a non-linear chronology within a multiverse and a narrative emerges from a constant discussion of the rules, roles and boundaries of game reality. As a result, it has been proved that storytelling in the studied tabletop role-playing game is carried out through the creation of a blend of mental spaces and frames, where players experience a liminal state and transformation with the help of verbal interactive experience.

Exploring the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy and role-playing games as an intervention for adults with social anxiety

ABSTRACT Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) have increased in popularity as a hobby and allows multiple people to play together online or in person. Group activities such as TTRPGs have been used to improve social skills and mental well-being Although there is qualitative and anecdotal studies and reports about the efficacy of the therapeutic application of TTRPGs, no related studies have employed quantitative measures or mental health screening tools. This study explored whether intentionally introduced cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) delivered through the medium of TTRPG groups could positively affect social skills, reduce anxiety symptoms and behaviors, and enhance the mental well-being of participants. Data was collected from May 2020 to February 2021 using the Social Phobia Inventory, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment, Social Skills Inventory, and Group Satisfaction Scale and debriefs with participants. The study was completed virtually. All the groups showed an average decrease in self-reported anxiety; one of the therapeutic TTRPG groups decreased in self-reported social anxiety, while the others remained the same. All of them showed improved social skill scores and the participants were very satisfied with the overall group experience, thus suggesting that their needs were met.

‘The Changes that Face Us’: Science Fiction as (Public) Legal Education

Much has been written on how science fiction allows us to interrogate imagined societal changes and potential yet-to-be realised futures. It also allows those who consume such texts to reflect upon their contemporaneous societies This paper refocuses this understanding of science fiction from an original and novel perspective, arguing that science fiction texts perform an educative function and can be considered a form of public legal education. To this end, this paper argues that science fiction performs a jurisprudential function in its treatment and popular presentation of legal issues and themes. Science fiction allows audiences and consumers to conceptualise abstract jurisprudential concepts, whether they are engaged with less interactive media (such as television or film) or experimenting more actively with these concepts via dynamic media (such as video games and tabletop role-playing games). This distinction between less interactive and more interactive media draws upon previous work by Newbery-Jones in 2015 that examined the jurisprudence of video games and the phenomenology of justice. It also focuses on science fiction’s potential to contribute to formal and public legal education. Finally, this paper explains the importance of public legal education in the twenty-first century and highlights science fiction’s critical role in encouraging engagement with jurisprudential themes and legal subject matter within the shifting sociopolitical landscape of the last decade.

Analog Role-Playing Game Studies: A Brazilian Overview

This paper aims to present an overview of analog role-playing games in Brazil.For this, it uses a mixed method that includes bibliographic research and document analysis in an autoethnographic perspective. The results from these different methodological approaches, which are evocative rather than exhaustive, are divided into two aspects: first, they present a briefhistory ofboth publications and the idiosyncrasies of the practice oflarps and tabletop role-playing games in Brazil; second, they seek to synthesize the academic perspectives observed in the field of analog role-playing game studies, privileging the main disciplines of study, as well as themes, addressed by Brazilianresearch. Thus, this paper seeks to serve as a summary of the Brazilian framework, to facilitate future dialogues. In this sense, it is more of a signal for international dialogue than an exhaustive mapping of Brazilian intellectual production regarding studies of analog role-playing games. This survey shows that several of the issues that permeate the Brazilian scene are common to other parts of the world and that, sometimes, because our intellectual production is available in Portuguese, we isolate ourselves from broader discussions. There are also problematic, endogenous patterns regarding the practice of analog role-playing games: there is a lack of documentation, which makes the sources for research scarce. Regarding the research itself, it is inferred that there is a lack of articulation among Brazilian researchers who, isolated, do not exchange knowledge among themselves.

An Analysis of the Literature Surrounding the Intersection of Role-Playing Games, Race, and Identity

Some of the most popular role-playing games (RPGs) limit the potential for diversity among play­er characters, link character abilities with their racial backgrounds, and provide platforms for real-life racism. This critical literature review examines a body of multidisciplinary scholarship and popular sources discussing race in fantasy RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. Integrating interdisciplinary literature on the topic of race in RPGs provides an opportunity for exploring race, games, and identity discourse from a criti­cal perspective. This article's analysis engages with power dynamics in games and provides a framework for po­sitioning future scholarship. While progress toward correcting racial misrepresentation and under-representa­tion in existing RPGs are slow, that progress is meaningful and it can pave the way for more significant changes in new RPGs. Fantasy games have a great potential to step outside the issues of real life and engage with topics such as race in a way that undermines stereotypes and encourages nuanced representations. Though there is not al­ways a clear parallel between a real-world race and a fantasy race, the notion of "otherness" connects the two ideas.
 RPGs are one of the most popular genres of game and fantasy RPGs impact real-world discourse. It is vital that schol­ars continue the work of the authors discussed in this paper by encouraging nuanced diversity ofrepresentation in games and advocating for"own voices" game designers. Only then can thepositivepotential of fantasy RPGs be more fully realized. As existing RPGs and new games work to reduce and correct racial stereotypes in digital and tabletop RPGs, scholars, design­ers, and players can worktogetherto move toward more nuanced, diverse representations and discourse surrounding RPGs.

A Scholarly Character Sheet to Frame Learning Activities and Improve Engagement

Character sheets are an essential element of game design for tabletop role-playing games. They can be adapted to frame a series of learning activities and to improve participants' engagement. In this study, they are used at the beginning of a five-session graduate seminar on library instruction to assess the participants' knowledge and present the curriculum. They are also used as wrap-up at the end of the final session to measure the participants' progress. Besides providing a better assessment of the group by the instructor, the character sheet activity improves comprehension of the content and offers an engaging opportunity to start the seminar and create a personal connection with the students. Through objectivation, a theoretical framework, I argue that character sheets can support metacognitive abilities like self-authorship, self-determination, and a growth mindset. By framing and matching the content with the participants' personal journey, character sheets provide gamified syllabi to improve motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes in a series of workshop activities.

Imagining Classics: Towards A Pedagogy of Gaming Reception

Tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) are an increasingly important mode of contemporary cultural production and a medium through which received ideas about the classical past are reproduced through play. This article shows how TRPGs can be analyzed in conjunction with classical texts and topics to highlight processes of cultural production in the ancient world in a university-level first year seminar through a series of cases comparing Homeric gods and heroism in the Iliad to the treatment of those topics in Dungeons and Dragons (1974) and Agon (2006), and a simple design exercise using Fate Accelerated (2013). These cases provided context and scaffolding for creative assignments in which students used ancient material to design their own games. Fostering student engagement with ancient material through the analysis, play, and design of modern games gives another pedagogical avenue for approaching ideas about how cultures influence texts and how ideas about the past are received in contemporary media.

Critical Success: The narrative weight of chance in TTRPG based shows (actual play)

In recent years TTRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game) based shows or actual plays have seen amazing growth, with shows like Critical Role being the number one grossing channel on the streaming platform Twitch .TV and Dimension 20 becoming the flagship content for the newly rebranded Dropout.TV. This shows put in the forefront of their storytelling, chance, and the players´ ability to improvise, to the detriment of a traditional screenplay. The failure or success of every action and the making of every player character (the stats and backstory of the characters are rolled and fleshed out in pre-production phases) is often determined by luck of the draw (dice roll, card draw…), thanks to the rules provided by the TTRPG system of choice (in most cases Dungeons & Dragons 5e). The system allows for Dungeon Masters (the players that run the game and consequently the story) to step out of the rules set and change the impact of some dice rolls, allowing the chance of a natural 20 on D20 roll to completely restructure the narrative of the story. Is this rolling of the die aspect and more important natural 20s and 1s where this study will focus, trying to comprehend how special they really are and how much impact they can have in the result of the show.

“This class doesn’t have a textbook?”: An overview of a TRPG course for L2 English learners in Japan

Background: Given the opportunity to teach a mixed language/content course and my longstanding interest in TRPGs and second-language acquisition, I made a course titled “Interaction through Tabletop Roleplaying Games.” Aim: The aim of the course was - beyond the development of students’ English language skills - to open a window into the world of tabletop roleplaying games and encourage students to see TRPGs as an opportunity to use English outside the classroom in a playful way and learn how to play them. Teaching methods: The course used three different TRPG systems of slowly advancing difficulty in order to acclimate the students to the genre and equip them with the basic schema they would need to participate fully in English. To introduce the materials, I began with a teacher-centered approach and then moved to a student-centered one as students became more familiar with the genre. Results: By the end of the course, students were able to play TRPGs unassisted in English by creating their own stories, characters, and adapting them to their playstyle. Some also expressed interest in playing TRPGs in their futures, or if not running a game themselves, said that they would be open to the idea if someone else invited them. Conclusion: In the future, I want to use this paper as a starting point to further refine and develop the course as well as the ideas within it.

Therapeutic Use of Role-Playing Game (RPG) in Mental Health: A Scoping Review

Background Role-playing game (RPG) is a term that covers a series of forms and styles of games that involve, in some way, the creation, representation and progression of characters who interact in a fictional world under a system of structured rules. Its applications and effects on human behavior and mental health are, however, still an underexplored area. Methods A scoping review was performed on the literature about RPGs as a therapeutic tool or prevention strategy in psychotherapies and mental health, highlighting studies’ populations, forms of RPG and interventions used. To that, a systematic search in the PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, BVS/LILACS databases and grey literature was performed. Results Of the 4,069 studies reviewed, 50 sources of evidence were included. The majority was published as of 2011 (78%) in journals (62%) and targeted therapeutic uses of RPGs (84%). Most interventions used computer (50%) or tabletop RPGs (44%), mostly with cognitive and/or behavioral (52%) therapeutical approaches and targeting adolescents (70%). Conclusion The findings suggest a potential use of RPGs as a complementary tool in psychotherapies. However, only 16% of the studies included were experimental. We identified considerable heterogeneity in RPGs definitions, outcomes and interventions used, preventing a systematic review. Thus, more empirical and well-designed studies on the application of RPGs in mental health are needed.

Castles & Capitalists

Castles & Capitalists Sarah Jones (bio) In 1990, the Christian author James Dobson issued a grave warning about “so-called fantasy roleplaying games.” They masquerade as simple creative exercises for children, but “the fact is, in order to play these games properly, you usually have to use magic and mysticism, things that are clearly not Christian,” he said dolefully. Some former players even said the game had led them into contact with demons, he asserted. Dobson, the founder of the influential organization Focus on the Family, didn’t mention any particular game by name. He didn’t have to: by the time his warning was broadcast, Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that starred elves, orcs, and other fantasy beings, had become synonymous with the “Satanic Panic” that had gripped the public imagination for the better part of a decade. If anything, Dobson’s warning arrived a little late. The game had malevolent power, evangelist Jack Chick insisted in a famous 1984 tract: it led to suicides and, even worse, goddess worship. Dobson’s warning, which originally aired on a long-running children’s radio show called Adventures in Odyssey, [End Page 11] circulated for years. Hearing it as a child in the late 1990s, I had a reaction Dobson didn’t intend: I was greatly impressed. Now I play in two Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. For each, I created a character who joins a handful of other players to fend off a variety of imaginative evils. The campaigns take place under a system of rules outlined in the Player’s Handbook and the guidance of a dungeon master who plans the sessions. Within those parameters, the creative and collaborative decisions of the players (and the luck of our many-sided dice) reign. Sessions typically last hours and are played around a table to make space for small props. The goal is immersion, a temporary commitment to a fantasy world. Nevertheless, reality tends to creep in. I named one character, an elf cleric, after a pair of Chick’s devil-haunted players. For me, and likely for thousands of others, the Christian right’s alarmism only increased the game’s mystique. Today, the game is almost ubiquitous. People who have never rolled a character have probably heard of its alignment chart, which divvies personalities up into good, evil, or neutral categories along a chaotic-to-lawful axis based on their objectives or background. COVID-19 seems to have only increased the game’s popularity. CNBC reported last March that sales for the game had jumped by 33 percent during the pandemic, which followed a steady six-year growth streak. Though the game’s been around since 1974, in some respects it seems as though its time has truly arrived. Talk of demons helped disguise the more prosaic reality of the game’s growth. As game historian Jon Peterson recounts at length in a new book, Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, the true history of D&D involves no mystical rituals, just familiar corporate skullduggery. While preachers and parents battled for the nation’s impressionable youth, the game’s architects battled over credits and royalties in a “great war” that would grow more fractious as the game became more popular. The stakes weren’t souls, but something else, something more tangible. Mammon rules all, and spares not even the most creative endeavor. In the 1960s, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson became obsessed with tabletop wargaming. Gygax was a dreamer, ill-equipped for life in the modern world; Arneson had similarly dedicated himself completely to his passion. For both, wargaming was an outlet, if not necessarily a way to make money. At least, not in the beginning. “The honor of working on a set of rules that might become popular in the gaming community was the lion’s share of the compensation,” Peterson observes. “It would take a miracle for a venture like this to end up providing someone with a livelihood—let alone a fortune.” Dungeons & Dragons was that lightning-strike chance. Yet when Gygax and Arneson first wrote the slim rule booklet that would become the most popular tabletop game in the world, their expectations were low: perhaps a...

Pretensive Shared Reality: From Childhood Pretense to Adult Imaginative Play.

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.

Speaking in Worlds of Adventure: Tabletop Roleplaying Games within the EFL Classroom

Fostering spoken communication in a foreign language classroom is not an easy task. With that in mind, this paper explores a proposal to motivate students’ L2 oral communication through the practice of narrative games called tabletop roleplaying games adapted as task-based activities. It implied an action research process in which the teacher-researcher with his students reflected and intervened on the identified problematic situation: Lack of oral communication in L2. In that sense, it started with a diagnostic test that showed the current state of verbal communication in L2 in a Colombian rural public school. Next, the teacher-researcher chose to appeal to the gamification of the classroom along with the adoption of a task-based framework to activity design aiming to improve students’ motivation to take the risk of communicating in L2. The teacher-researcher applied sets of activities that progressed from traditional role-play to a tabletop roleplaying game. In accordance, video recordings, narratives, artifacts collections, and semi-structured interviews were essential to collect data. Afterward, the teacher-researcher analyzed the data with an emic approach to identify patterns in the information that uncovered the categories and subcategories of information. Consequently, the teacher-researcher concluded that the students feel better motivated using L2 if the learning environment offers opportunities for social interaction, collaborative work, and scaffolding in task-based exercises embedded in a fictional world game.

„Rzuć K8 na inicjatywę”, czyli o narracji drugoosobowej w grach fabularnych

 The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of using the second-person narrative in tabletop role-playing games. Despite its ambiguous status in literary projects, the dyadic narrative is the basic component of the phenomenon of pen-and-paper RPGs. In the intro­duction, the author briefly introduces the specificity of text-based narrative games and the history of their creation. Then the most popular systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, were characterized, as well as examples of games created in Poland. To illustrate the phenomenon, official manuals, and recordings of sessions of the most popular Polish artists published on YouTube were used. When discussing examples of second-person narration, the author draws attention to its occurrence in guides and in the statements of the player functioning as the Game Master. The Game Master is a specific narrator of heroes’ adventures, who in his action smoothly moves between different types of narratives (first, sec­ond and third person): he describes the scenery and actions of NPCs and creatures, constructs statements of characters not guided by other participants of the session, but also comments on the actions and commands of player-created heroes. It is precisely in this last type of activity that the dyadic narrative is extremely important. In the statements of the Game Master, it manifests itself primarily as a commentary on the actions of the characters, the continuation of the plot after the actions and statements of the players, and when consulting the heroes’ further actions, but also serves technical communication related primarily to the mechanics of throwing polyhedral dice. The use of a second-person narrative in RPGs primarily contributes to increasing the immersion, the involvement, and the sense of interactivity between players.

Role-Playing Games and Well-Being

Do role-playing games (RPGs) affect the player’s well-being? Several studies suggest that they might have an impact, but the topic of RPGs and well-being is usually only mentioned as a side note or curiosity. A clear, coherent picture on the topic of RPGs and well-being is missing. This review article aims to provide that picture by compiling the already existing knowledge in one place. I ask the questions: What can we learn from the already existing research? How should RPGs and well-being be studied? What questions need resolving? What can be gained from studying RPGs and well-being?
 RPG studies is a young academic interdisciplinary field of research, as is also the research of arts and well-being. They both are heterogeneous and related to a variety of academic traditions. They both are also dispersed, pragmatic, and until recently, scattered and lacking cohesive traditions or methodologies. Many basic ontological questions remain unsolved and the definitions of key concepts vary. They overlap in several discourses, such as the ones about (1) practices of sociodrama and replication therapy; (2) social, cultural, and digital capital; (3) leisure time research; (4) performance studies; (5) the topic of erotic role-play; (6) problematic vs. therapeutic gaming; and (7) health education. Previous research and practices focus mainly on live action role play (larp) and well-being, suggesting a positive impact. Online RPGs share their own traditions, but studies on tabletop RPGs and well-being are difficult to find. The studies are often case-studies or examine abstract topics such as human experiences.
 In these studies, it becomes evident that RPGs do indeed impact well-being. However, questions such as how, why, and what features in RPGs affect well-being remain unanswered. In addition, the research has mainly been executed from the perspective of either RPGs or arts and well-being. Interdisciplinary cooperation is the key to successfully diving into the world of RPGs and well-being. Doing so would offer both fields useful practices, interesting perspectives, new opportunities for publication and academic discussion. It would not only add knowledge about RPGs and well-being but offer perspective to the unresolved ontological questions of each field. Eventually, further study on RPGs and well-being could transfer into the usage of RPGs in the fields of well-being, health, and therapy in a similar manner that arts are currently being used.

The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons

This research project explores the prevalence of violence and its facilitation in the popular tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Violence within the system’s 5th edition core rulebook, the Player’s Handbook (Wizards of the Coast 2014b), is analysed using textual analysis with insight from previous research on common violence motivators of heroism, hatred, and sensation-seeking curiosity. Overall, the study concludes that the D&D system facilitates playing violence, specifically through heroic motivation based on androcentric perceptions of chivalric fantasy ideals. This study also finds that the system spotlights combat over nonviolent interactions. Future research could investigate how participant agency may affect violence in similar traditional RPG systems, and why choosing violence in a no-consequence game could reflect real-world behaviours.

Fantasy In Real Life: Making Meaning from Vicarious Experiences with a Tabletop RPG Internet Stream

This study investigated the experiences of people who claimed exposure to Critical Role, a web series featuring a group of voice actors playing a tabletop role-playing game (TRPG), impacted their lives in meaningful ways beyond entertain-ment. Building on previous research that documented players engaging in role-playing games, livestreaming, and role-playing game (RPG) fandom subculture, this study specifically explored the perspectives of individuals who reported a transformation-al impact of experiencing gaming vicariously through watching Critical Role. This paper reports a detailed narrative of one of the cases from qualitative interviews, which conveys major themes that illustrate the perspective of the individual watching. The paper compliments this detailed case description with a discussion of findings from seven in depth interviews to explore the experiences of the interviewee focused on in the context of the study sample. This study is primarily focused on the individ-ual watchers’ experience of gameplay and role-playing experiences, which they attribute to personal growth. The term paraso-cial gaming is introduced to characterize a part of vicarious experience associated with watching media figures playing games.

International Journal of Role-playing 11 -- Full Issue -- IJRP

IJRP 11: Full Issue
 Table of Contents
 Evan Torner, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and William J. White, “Editorial Introduction to Issue 11”
 Some context for the current issue, especially with regard to current critiques of themes of violence and oppression in games, as well as this year’s Call for Papers on Applied Role-playing Games and the excellent articles submitted in response.
 Sarah Albom, “The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons”
 A textual analysis evaluating the language used in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player’s Handbook. This article discusses the ways that the text incentivizes characters to take violent actions more often than offering peaceful solutions.
 Diana J. Leonard, Jovo Janjetovic, Maximilian Usman, “Playing to Experience Marginalization: Benefits and Drawbacks of ‘Dark Tourism’ in Larp”
 An examination of how playing characters with marginalizations the player does not share can lead to perspective taking and empathy, but can also cause harm if not done with care.
 Joe Lasley, “Fantasy In Real Life: Making Meaning from Vicarious Experiences with a Tabletop RPG Internet Stream”
 A qualitative study examining seven fans of the livestream show Critical Role, in which actors play Dungeons & Dragons. The fans described an increase in their well-being due to parasocial relationships with the fiction and players in the show.
 Kerttu Lehto, “Role-Playing Games and Well-Being”
 A secondary literature review discussing the main themes in role-playing game studies, as well as arts and well-being as fields of study. This author advocates for more dialogue between these fields as a fruitful line of inquiry, especially with regard to the design of games for personal development and well-being.
 Josephine Baird, “Role-playing the Self – Trans Self-Expression, Exploration, and Embodiment in Live Action Role-Playing Games”
 An autoethnography blending gender theory with personal experience exploring gender in role-playing games and other performance spaces. The author considers how best to design larps explicitly to help trans people embody their identities.
 Katrin Geneuss, “The Use of the Role-playing Technique STARS in Formal Didactic Contexts”
 A summary of Design-based Research on 16 educational live action role-playing games (edu-larps) created for German schools. This article offers several best practices for educators who seek to implement edu-larp in the classroom.

The Quest for Motivation

Studies have shown Tabletop Role Playing Games (TRPGs) to be effective motivational learning tools that can be utilized in various subject matters. However, limited research has analyzed the elements within TRPGs that enable them to provide motivation to the users. As such, this study conducted an in-depth examination of the elements of TRPGs through the perception of players. Self-determination theory helped frame the study, while the Generic Qualitative Inquiry approach was used for the methodology. Semi structured interviews were conducted with six participants. Data revealed several themes that aligned with the motivational frame related to competency, relatedness, and autonomy. The findings indicate the importance of the roleplaying element and the connection between the player and their in-game character, as well as the effect choices within the game have on the players and other elements of TRPGs. Implications regarding design of TRPGs as learning tools are discussed.