Have you ever had an interactive storytelling experience in which you had every single opportunity and every single choice?
Many video games, books, and other pieces of interactive media strive their hardest to give you the closest approximation of free will, and for the most part, they aren’t even half bad at it. Writers of Choose Your Own Adventure novels have more room to both advance plot while also giving the reader a vast array of choices to make during the progression of the story. Video games try their hardest to meet the same level of free will by making their worlds larger, giving side quests, and even making moral choices count in some situations.
I cried.
Despite all of this, games and books still don’t reach the full potential of free will. Your character can’t abandon certain plot threads in video games, and books don’t have any adaptability (for obvious reasons). But there is one medium out there that already exists that gives you the closest you are going to get to human free will, and it’s pretty close: Tabletop games.
For everyone out there who’s groaning, well, I’m sorry you don’t enjoy spending time around a table with some friends. Tabletop games are a great way to bring people together, and in my experience, bring out some pretty unique and wonderful moments. They aren’t just limited to “Dungeons and Dragons,” either, so even if you aren’t a fantasy buff, you needn’t worry. I’ve played spaghetti westerns, modern fantasy, 80s sci-fi, and loads more—and I’m even working on one set in Victorian England! The sky’s the limit for the ideas you can come up with and execute when it comes to tabletop games.
For those of you who don’t know, the gist of tabletop games is that you play as characters you create from the ground up. The rulebook and character sheets are skeletons that you use to flesh out a character entirely of your own design. All you have to do is pick a race and go from there. If the rulebook allows it, then you can play it, and some rulebooks are pretty lenient with who you can be!
Most games have class systems as well, though I have seen a few games where that isn’t a mechanic at all. Class systems give you an extra set of skills based on who you are, not as a person, but as an occupation. In classic “Dungeons in Dragons,” for instance, bards, paladins, wizards, etc. can use spells because their classes call for it, while other classes are limited to a few spells, and some classes don’t allow magic altogether!
You can choose your race and your class, flesh out your character, and then throw them right into the fray. Every choice in a situation is entirely yours, and only you can make your character do anything. Sometimes things happen that fiddle with your character’s perception, but that’s the closest you can get to losing control.
If you have a good Game Master and some good friends as Player Characters, then most adventures are lively, heart-pounding, and fun!
Take, for instance, my character from a campaign using “Monster Hearts,” which sets the game in a modern fantasy/supernatural/horror setting. The story revolves around teenagers who aren’t all they seem… because they’re not human!
This is Aster’s character sheet. I didn’t print a physical copy of the actual character sheet because I have a system of note-taking that works better for me, but the basic details are here!
As you can see by my scribbles on the top right, things got pretty fraught in the campaign. By the end of the night, my character was attacked by a werewolf and nearly eaten by one of his friends. Pretty crazy, right?
He’s a Faerie, hence the flowers. Plus I really like flowers, so that’s not even a necessary excuse.
After getting one of his friends, who is one of the Player Characters, to safety, I had Aster run after the werewolf because he was heading toward some of Aster’s other friends. The resulting injuries to Aster’s person were mildly severe (half of his life, in fact), but Aster discovered some new things along the way, so I consider it well worth the risk I took. Aster’s not physically primed for a fight, and his stats reflect that (see the Volatile stat), so maybe throwing a rock at the werewolf wasn’t the greatest idea. But the choices I made to get to that point, and even in that moment, were entirely my own—I could have just as easily not gone to where the werewolf was. I could have done something different from throwing a rock at it. The possibilities in that scene were limitless, and were entirely up to me.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for an open-world and multiplayer game with endless possibilities and many different scenarios, some of which only cost as much as it takes to print out the booklet, then you should look no further than tabletop games.
