It’s come to my attention that tabletop role-playing games are coming back in fashion, which made me scratch my head a little. Were paper-and-pencil (P&P) RPGs ever in fashion? Having grown up in a small rural town and having an undeniable nerdy streak in me (I ran a pre-pubescent knight school for my neighborhood’s kids…mostly trashcan-lid shields and wiffleball bat swords), I was naturally drawn to dice-rollers as an outlet for creativity and a fun way to spend time with friends that was a little more intellectually stimulating than throwing rocks at passing train cars. TOR’s Dungeons and Dragons, the “advanced” version, developed from a fun diversion in elementary school into an obsession by middle school. Later it became World of Darkness games by White Wolf, the perfect sexualized gothic-nightmare kind of narrative for a teenaged boy whose favorite movies are Dracula and The Crow.

I’ve only flirted with P&P role-playing in my adult life, occasionally story-telling a WoD: Vampire game or downloading a PDF rulebook just to reminisce. However, when I came across “Hipster Spellcraft Skill” on a subreddit of Reddit.com specifically for RPGers, I started to realize that table-topping might be starting to get the mainstream cred it deserves. The thread was “controversial”, but in such a nerdily (that’s a word) acceptable way that I found myself appreciating it anyway.

Back when I was playing regularly, if one wanted to maintain a social life outside of roleplaying games and their playing “troupe”, one needed to be a closet table-topper. You don’t talk about it in polite conversation, the same way you try not to mention religion, politics, or abortion. Unless your friends already played, it was very difficult to find another group, because no one advertised. Even if you did, it may not be the right game, version, edition, or “realm” depending on what particular brand of “nerdery” you were looking for.

Now it seems that cat is largely out of the box (the big-ass sabre-toothed kind from AD&D’s Dragonlance.) Not only that, but a lot more people are homebrewing RPG’s and farming out their ideas on the internet. With a child, a full-time job, and healthy writing problem, I rarely have time to delve into the depths of a dungeon or prowl the night-time streets in search of prey. However, I can appreciate that other people are carrying the flag, and even more widely and better connected than ever. I even found a completely interactive Google global map in which White Wolf communities are using the internet to organize. What better way for a culture of people that have been notoriously shunned by the mainstream as everything from the relatively innocent “weirdos” to the vehemently belligerent “Satan worshippers” to organize, get their message out, and spread one of the most collaborative and creatively engaging forms of entertainment we have available.