TTRPG Tag

I’ve played three long-form TTRPG campaigns. (TTRPG is basically what you think of what you think of Dungeon’s & Dragons.) The first campaign lasted about two years, and I was the GM (Game Master, which basically means I ran it instead of played a character in it). We used D&D5e and I realized that after about level 10 the system sort of falls apart.

After that we switched to Pathfinder 2e, which had just come out. The three-action system was a real game changer. I was a play for this one, and it also lasted about two years.

Now we are on our third game (PF2e), which I am GMing again. We’re over two years into it, and I’d say only 65% or so done with the whole story. I don’t mean to be taking a long time, but my players are very fastidious people and I created a world space of like 250 different islands to visit. But this game we are currently playing takes up a lot of my time to organize and run every week. (We play for about 8 hours a week.) So some of my posts on here will probably be about that.

(I’ve also played a few games using systems like Blades in the Dark, Microscope, and Monsterhearts. But those were shorter games, so I’m not counting them.)

So why TTRPG as a tag and not D&D (or DnD)? Well, because the unification of TTRPG under D&D has been a problem. Though saying “Dungeons & Dragons” gets the idea across the same way saying “Kleenex” does, it’s reductive of other systems. Wizards of the Coast, who own the D&D brand, have also done some really shitty stuff recently, like trying to trademark all of their terms that they previously promised would be open source. Though they’ve backpedaled on that, it’s led to dozens of other systems (Pathfinder included) having to rename a ton of stuff just in case they decide to do it again. (An example of this is the term Dungeon Master, which technically only D&D can use. Other games use GM. Or the spell Magic Missile, which PF2e has renamed to Force Barrage.)

In short, I use TTRPG to represent the greater category, in hopes that it becomes less common to say D&D. (I also really struggle with switching to GM from DM!)

Okay, that’s it. Now this tag makes sense, I hope.