Designed and authored by Gillen in collaboration with tabletop designer Grant Howitt, the DIE TTRPG asks players to adopt roles that are closer to home than most fantasy campaigns. Players take on the personas of fictional RPG players living in the real world, who are then thrust into the fictional fantasy world of their campaign. Affectionately described as “Goth Jumanji,” “Alice in Wonderland by way of Eberon,” and “Nerd Isekai,” DIE takes gamers to an entirely new realm of role-playing. Game Rant spoke to Gillen and Howitt about designing a game around this complex idea.

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Role-Playing as Self-Discovery

DIE’s core premise may seem recursive, role-playing as a role-player. But much like Gillen’s comic, the DIE TTRPG’s postmodern hook acts as a mirror for the relationships between reality and fiction that might otherwise be invisible, or taken for granted.

Exploring different aspects of one’s self is at the heart of every role-playing experience. At their core, RPGs are less about becoming someone different, and more about revealing parts of the player that are dormant, repressed, or undiscovered. DIE explicitly examines this process of personal mythmaking by making it part of the game mechanics. The result is a system that’s intimate and refreshingly new. The “persona” characters that players adopt - fictional players living in a real-world setting - simultaneously act as vehicles for self-reflection and an intermediary step between fantasy and reality.

DIE’s Fictional Personas and Real Catharsis

Making a game about playing games is not only a conceptual novelty, it’s also a potential recipe for fun sessions around the table. Navigating charts, meticulously planning out character builds, and figuring out dice roll bonuses has an inherent appeal, but sometimes the arcane nature of tabletop mechanics can be dry. Framing a campaign around the intersection of empowering escapism and real trauma should lead to a degree of emotional depth underlying every encounter. The real-world weight of those encounters makes for campaigns that are memorable, harrowing, and hilarious, according to Gillen.

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DIE is not a crunchy, combat-centric tabletop experience, but it is also not lacking depth, or an exercise for the faint of heart. The game’s focus on finding reality in fantasy may force players to confront aspects about playing games, or their even own identities, that are uncomfortable. Role-playing often leads players to personal epiphanies, but DIE is primed to elicit those reactions by design.

Essential Rituals in DIE

Gillen has detailed careful “rituals” designed to make weighty topics such as mind-body problems, addressing cognitive dissonance, and confronting trauma more “fun.” DIE’s Masters - the class occupying the role of a dungeon master - must address their players carefully to ensure things do not get too real. When a Master asks players to describe an instance of treachery, for example, the questions must be framed in a way that draws a clear distinction between the player’s real self and their persona.

These protocols allow players to confront real issues with a degree of separation. By rooting their player characters in reality, there is more room to incorporate personal demons and baggage into gameplay, with rituals protecting the party from psychological faux pas. At the same time, the game’s fantastic setting rife with knights who draw power from emotions, magical techno-rogues, mind-controlling diplomats, divine actuaries, and picaresque swashbucklers, arms players with a variety of means to confront trauma.

The Kickstarter campaign for DIE: The Roleplaying Game is live until Friday, June 10, 2022.

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Source: Kickstarter