I turned 41 earlier this year. That means, by my count, I’ve been playing RPGs for something like 37 years in one form or another. It started with games of pretend, proto-LARPs which ended in a lot of “I hit you!”s and “Nuh-uh!”s. As I got older, my games became more sophisticated. Books with explicit rules. Randomness and die rolls, sometimes cards and coins. At this point, I’ve sat at dozens of tables with hundreds of players, and I’ll say one thing: everyone does it different.
Except, they also kind of don’t.
Almost, but not quite, all games I find myself in follow a fairly common formula. A handful of folks, between say 3 and 6, sit around a table, or gather together over a virtual tabletop. One of them is ‘in charge’ in the sense that they’re the game master. The rest of the folks aroud the table form the party, each piloting their own character. They play whatever system or game it is that they’ve selected for a couple of hours, before stressing out about when they can get together next.
There’s nothing wrong with playing tabletop RPGs that way. It’s a perfectly cromulent and super enjoyable way to play TTRPGs. The thing is, I think it’s kind of limiting. There’s no reason we need to get together with 5 or 6 other people. A game can have as few as one or two players. Players can inhabit more than one character. A table can have no dms or more than one.
We’ll look at the ontological breakdown of TTRPGs and the axis we can vary them on in a sceond, but I want to start with a brief discussion of how we got here. If you flip open just about any tabletop RPG rulebook, whether it’s Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, Monster of the Week, or Fabula Ultima, you’ll find a familiar section right near the front. It’s usually called something like “What Is a Roleplaying Game?” or “How to Play.” And almost every time, it offers some variation on the same setup: a group of players each take on the role of a single character in a shared imaginary world. One player, the Game Master, serves as the narrator, and referee (and often world-builder). The players describe what they want to do, the GM describes what happens, and dice (or cards, or coins) inject just enough chaos to keep things interesting.
It’s a tidy little loop, and it works well enough to get new players onboard quickly. It draws a straight line from the way we all used to play make-believe as kids. It layers on rules to settle the whole “I hit you” “Nuh-uh” loop, and the structure honestly helps in guiding our imaginations. The structure is familiar, intuitive, and reinforced in nearly every published module, actual play podcast, and convention one-shot. It’s so common, in fact, that it starts to feel natural. Not just one way to play, but the way to play.
In some ways, it’s so ingrained in the gaming culture that exposure to other things can be shocking. I remember the first time I encountered Living Greyhawk. Multiple tables all playing in the same universe, communicating progress back up to a central governing body that then designed the next arc of the game based on how things were going in aggregate. The national Vampire the Masquerade LARP was equally earth shattering, with its structured hierarchy by geographic regions, and national level coordination on arcs and plot lines. Watching Trevor Duvall play TTRPGs alone using the Mythic GME on “Me, Myself, and Die” felt equally transgressive.
Each of these approaches to roleplaying is a fine way to play, but they each play with the shape of what we’ve come to expect a roleplaying game to be. Let’s follow their lead and take a more expansive view of TTRPGs for a moment. Strip away the expectations about character sheets, initiative order, or even whether there’s a dungeon to crawl, and what we’re really left with is this: a group of people collaborating to create a story. That’s the core. A TTRPG is a framework for shared fiction, a structured way to collectively imagine a world, inhabit its people, and watch what happens next.
The rules we use, whether it’s roll a d20 and beat a target number, draw a card and resolve a move, or pull a block from a Jenga tower, aren’t just there for flavor or balance. They serve a deeper function: they arbitrate possibility. They constrain what characters can do, how the world reacts, and who gets to decide. They provide a scaffolding for narrative, establishing stakes and boundaries without scripting the outcome. In doing so, they allow players to engage more fully with the fiction, confident that the story has rules even when it doesn’t have a script.
And then there’s the role of chance. Dice, cards, tables, these tools introduce surprise, and with it, tension. They push back against player certainty, making success feel earned and failure feel dramatic. They create moments none of us could have planned, and it’s in those moments, when the critical hit lands at just the right time or a character fails their big speech, that stories gain texture and momentum. They don’t just generate plot points; they force us to adapt, to reinterpret, to build meaning around the unexpected.
That’s what makes the form so endlessly rich: it’s not just about pretending to be elves or space pirates or post-apocalyptic scavengers. It’s about discovering stories together, with rules that shape the journey and chance that keeps us honest. So, in that light, lets re-examine the feature space of TTRPGs, not from a genre perspective, but from a how the game is played perspective.
If what we’re doing is creating shared fiction, it becomes clear that the standard way of playing is actually just one entry in a large space. Let’s treat each of the standard features of a TTRPG as an axis that we could vary:
- The number of DMs
- The number of Groups engaging with a world
- The number of characters a player controls
- The temporal flow of the narrative
- The number of players
We explore each axis in more detail below.
The Number of DMs
Most rulebooks treat the presence of a single Dungeon Master (or Game Master, Keeper, Narrator, etc.) as a given. It’s part of the assumed social contract: one person takes on the responsibility of preparing the world, portraying the NPCs, adjudicating the rules, and pacing the narrative. But that’s just one way to divide the labor, and often a fairly demanding one. Once we start asking whether a game needs a DM at all, a whole range of possibilities opens up.
DMless systems take the traditional GM role and either distribute it across the table or eliminate it entirely. Games like Fiasco, For the Queen, or Wanderhome use prompts, mechanics, or shared expectations to generate scenes and resolve conflicts without needing a centralized authority. These systems emphasize narrative collaboration and often foreground character relationships or thematic exploration over tactical or logistical challenges. When designed well, they let everyone play and no one prep—which can be both freeing and creatively generative.
At the other end of the spectrum, co-DMing can be a pragmatic solution for especially large tables or mechanically complex games. In long-running campaigns with eight or more players, splitting the DM role between two facilitators, one managing rules and encounters, the other focused on roleplay and worldbuilding, can reduce bottlenecks and improve flow. Similarly, some groups co-DM when running modular or nonlinear content, with each DM responsible for a different region, faction, or narrative thread. This is especially frequent in large play-by-post groups, where DM responsibilities may be divided by character level, geographic region, character political ties, or other game-relevant axis.
And then there’s the rotating DM model, common in shared-world campaigns like West Marches or longform Discord servers. In these games, players take turns running sessions, often with a shared understanding of tone, world canon, and mechanical expectations. This approach democratizes narrative authority and encourages deeper buy-in from everyone at the table. It can also lead to wonderfully unexpected developments as multiple perspectives and styles collide in the same setting.
What all these approaches have in common is a willingness to challenge the idea that one person must sit behind the screen. Whether the GM role is distributed, delegated, or passed around like a talking stick, rethinking how and by whom stories are facilitated can make room for different voices and different stories.
Number of Groups Engaging with a World
Most games assume a single adventuring party moving through a world at a more or less steady pace. But what happens when more than one group plays in the same setting—at the same time, or even in the same narrative space? Just like we can reimagine the role of the DM, we can also expand our understanding of who gets to participate in a given story—and how those stories connect.
Some groups experiment with the idea of a party and anti-party: two tables operating independently but on a collision course. One group might be rebels, the other the enforcers of a crumbling empire. Each table plays separate sessions, but their choices ripple outward, shared calendars, messaging, or artifacts passed between tables can drive tension. Eventually, their narratives may intersect, or clash outright, creating memorable stakes that no GM could have scripted in isolation.
Other games explore living world formats, where multiple groups operate in the same setting but different locations. These groups don’t necessarily meet, but their choices shift the world’s political or ecological landscape. A party of mercenaries may topple a kingdom in the east, triggering instability in the west where a different group is trying to negotiate peace. This model turns the campaign world into a shared ecosystem, one where groups shape history collectively even if they never share a scene.
A related but distinct format is module voting, where each group runs the same scenario, but the aggregate player behavior determines what becomes canon. In some organized play settings (like Living Greyhawk or some Pathfinder Society arcs), players might all vote on whether a major NPC lives or dies, or whether a city sides with a particular faction. The version that “wins” becomes official for future adventures. It’s a blend of democracy and metagame storytelling, and it allows a huge player base to steer a common narrative, sometimes in unpredictable directions.
And then there are the truly wild experiments. At a Call of Cthulhu convention game I once attended, every table was a different parallel dimension. Each group explored the same central mystery but under slightly altered laws of reality. Every 30 minutes, the organizers forced a character swap, rotating one player from each table into the others’ worlds. Suddenly, what you ‘knew’ about the mystery and what the group knew was suddenly wrong. The disorientation was intentional and deeply compelling.
These formats aren’t just novelty. They offer a vision of tabletop play that’s more communal, more dynamic, and often more reflective of complex themes like systems, uncertainty, and perspective. When you scale out from the single table, the game becomes more than just your party’s journey, it becomes a living, breathing world shaped by many hands.
The Number of Characters a Player Controls
Most TTRPGs stick to the one-player, one-character model. It’s clean, intuitive, and great for role immersion, but it’s also a design choice. Shifting the number of characters under a player’s control can open up new strategic layers, storytelling opportunities, and emotional dynamics that single-character play simply can’t reach.
Take Paranoia, for example. In that world, death is frequent, often hilarious, and rarely final because every player gets a set of clones. When one dies (or is “terminated” for treason), the next clone in line arrives, often with slight memory loss or glitches. The clone mechanic doesn’t just keep the game going, it changes how players engage with risk, identity, and continuity. You start thinking in terms of “your team of selves,” not just your avatar in the moment.
In Blades in the Dark, the character count stretches in a different direction. While each player has a primary scoundrel they play during heists and downtime, the table collectively manages a second “meta-character”: the crew. The crew has its own progression, reputation, turf, and mechanical systems. That shared layer forces players to think beyond the personal. You’re not just playing your character, you’re building an organization, and making decisions that may favor group interests over individual arcs. It’s a subtle form of dual-roleplay, and it shapes the entire rhythm of campaign progression.
Many mecha or cyberpunk games take things even further. In Shadowrun, a rigger might control not just their body, but a full stable of drones, each with its own sensors, weapons, and tactical roles. In Lancer or other mecha-focused games, players often control both the pilot and their machine, sometimes with distinct character sheets, abilities, and even personalities. This duality lets the fiction explore themes of identity, control, embodiment, and disassociation. Who are you, really: the squishy person inside the cockpit, or the walking god of war stomping across the battlefield?
But multiplicity doesn’t always mean more bodies on the field. Sometimes, it means giving voice to the different selves within a single character. Disco Elysium made this visceral with Harry Du Bois and his chorus of internal drives, Electrochemistry, Empathy, Authority, each one a facet of his personality with its own motives and tactics. In the tabletop space, Jamais Vu follows that same path, turning the psyche into a playable ensemble. Each player controls a part of the same person’s mind, negotiating actions, impulses, and interpretations of reality. It’s a stark inversion of the typical “one player, one character” model: here, the character is shared, and the player is fractured. Rather than dilute the experience, this kind of internal multiplicity deepens it, inviting players to explore contradiction, doubt, and self-sabotage from the inside out.
The Temporal Flow of the Narrative
If you’ve played most mainstream TTRPGs, you’re probably used to time moving forward in a fairly straight line: the party enters the dungeon, clears the first room, sets up camp, and then continues deeper. It’s tidy, intuitive, and easy to manage at the table, but like everything else we’ve been talking about, that structure is a choice.
Some games introduce flashbacks not as storytelling devices but as core mechanics. In Blades in the Dark, for example, players can declare a flashback mid-heist to retroactively justify how they’re prepared for the current moment. It’s not just a cinematic flourish, it’s a design decision that shifts the rhythm of play from cause-and-effect to effect-then-cause. The fiction still unfolds forward, but it carries with it the texture of hindsight and improvisational planning.
Flash-forwards work similarly, offering glimpses of what’s to come and letting players shape the narrative in reverse. A character might describe the outcome of a critical mission, and the session becomes about how they got there. It’s a technique borrowed from film and TV, but it works surprisingly well in tabletop, adding a sense of fatalism, suspense, or irony to the play. Games that use prophecy, future selves, or posthumous narration all lean on this model to create structure through anticipation.
And then there are games like Artefact, which break time wide open. In Artefact, the player follows the life of a single magical item across centuries. Scenes unfold during great wars, long periods of abandonment, brief moments of discovery, and eventual decay—each jump radically reframing what came before. The game doesn’t just allow for a nonlinear timeline, it requires one. Time becomes a landscape to explore rather than a path to walk. This kind of temporal abstraction invites players to think thematically instead of sequentially, asking what changes and what endures across eras.
The Number of Players
The assumed default for a TTRPG group is somewhere between four and six players, plus a GM. It’s the sweet spot most systems are built around, balancing party roles, spotlight time, and social energy. But like everything else we’ve explored, that expectation is just one option among many, and sometimes, smaller is not only possible, but better.
Solo TTRPGs have seen a renaissance in recent years, with games like Thousand Year Old Vampire, Alone Among the Stars, and The Wretched offering experiences that are equal parts journaling, improvisation, and meditation. These games often blend evocative prompts with minimal mechanics, giving the player space to explore deeply personal stories or abstract themes. There’s no one to perform for, no one to keep pace with. You play entirely for yourself, and the result is often more like writing a novella than running a campaign. This isn’t a sad consolation prize. It’s an RPG like any other, tailored to your specific needs and wants.
Duet play, games for two people, often one GM and one player, sit somewhere between solo introspection and group dynamism. It allows for intense character focus, deep emotional arcs, and scheduling ease. Games like Sleeping Gods, Anamnesis, or even stripped-down versions of traditional systems thrive in this space. Without a table of competing voices, duets let you linger in a conversation, explore a relationship, or drill deep into a mystery. The pacing becomes tailored, and the intimacy of the format often encourages more vulnerable, character-driven stories.
Even low-player-count games, say, two or three players, create a distinct feel. Without a big party to soak up danger, every encounter feels riskier. Without the need to balance five backstories, every character gets more spotlight. The logistics become simpler, the stories tighter. It’s not about doing less with fewer people; it’s about doing different. Political intrigue, interpersonal drama, survival horror, these genres often thrive in the quiet tension that small groups can sustain.
Fewer players doesn’t mean fewer possibilities. In fact, the smaller the group, the more elastic the fiction becomes. You can zoom in closer, pivot faster, and chase character moments that would be lost in the churn of a larger party. Sometimes, all you need is one other person, or none at all, to tell a story worth remembering.
So What?
In summary and conclusion, the “What is an RPG?” section at the start of most rulebooks does exactly what it’s supposed to: it gives newcomers a way in. It lowers the barrier to entry, it frames the experience in familiar terms, and it gives people permission to play. That’s valuable. But it also quietly narrows our collective imagination about what TTRPGs can be.
The default model, one GM, one party, one character each, one linear story, works well, but it isn’t the whole picture. Many forms of play that already exist in the wild, solo journaling games, convention formats, shared-world campaigns, fit neatly into the taxonomy we’ve outlined. They’re not weird edge cases. They’re part of a broader ecosystem of gamified shared fiction.
And that framing, shared fiction shaped by rules, chance, and choice, is one I think better serves experienced players and GMs alike. It gives us permission to question assumptions. To see structure as a tool, not a cage.
If you’re a GM, consider adding a new layer to your next game. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are easy to implement and can radically shift how players think about character development. Try rotating the GM role for one-shots, or hand off world-building duties to the table. See what happens when control is a shared resource.
If you’re a player, try something outside the norm. Play a solo game that speaks only to you. Join a duet where every glance matters. Pilot two characters with clashing goals. Or step into a game where time is broken and meaning is built from fragments. There are as many ways to roleplay as there are people willing to try.