I asked a friend of mine who enjoys professional basketball what he finds appealing about it; I don’t understand the appeal. Would it surprise you to learn D&D wasn’t fun or appealing to this friend when he gave it a try a few years before?

We feel very different about one another’s interests but his answer gave me new insight into what I enjoy about “playing pretend” with my friends in the form of TTRPGs.

He said professional sports are one place where no one knows the end of the story.

It was like realizing your psychologist was dead the whole time or that your brother had stolen your watch. Flashbacks of times at the table with friends were unfolding in my mind. His words gave me clarity that I didn’t have before.

I like playing TTRPGs when they’re stories no one knows the end of.

I like it when I don’t have to avoid spoilers because the stories can't be written ahead of time. When we work together to create and tell a new story. In that way it's a microcosm of life.

I don’t find sports any more interesting and my friend doesn’t find D&D any more tolerable, but it's funny how they overlap.

I don’t want to know

The best counter example of this is the player who knows the Monster Manual inside and out. They identify a creature from the DM’s description and employ the optimum combat strategy even if they’re playing a first level fighter whose backstory is that they ran away from life on a farm. Maybe you are that player.

That makes the game a lot less fun for me.

I don't want to know the creatures

When I encounter trolls in a game setting for the first time, I wonder if they’re intelligent. What do they want? Do they have a culture? Why are they here? I hope this isn’t just a combat encounter with the right CR. Are these Three Billy Goats Gruff, “live under the bridge” trolls, Roast Mutton trolls, or The Bridge of Khazad-dûm trolls? Are Three Billy Goats Gruff trolls solitary individuals with personal motives or are they a network of individuals with greater goals and concerns but also grudges and internal politics?

I don’t want to know the setting

I don’t want to know anything about the setting either. If it's reskinned Waterdeep, Sword Coast, or Atlantis I don’t want to know. I avoid all sourcebooks entirely. I don’t read about magical items I don’t have. I don’t want to know what the pantheon is. The characters don’t know what’s in the sourcebook. Anything could happen. So why assume, or invite outside pressures onto the story?

I don’t want to metagame.

When another character learns something that my character doesn’t know—by questioning an NPC, by casting Detect Thoughts, in a book they found—I as a player don’t want to know. Role playing isn’t an exercise in min/maxing decision making for me. Sometimes people make suboptimal decisions and sometimes they make decisions that are informed by facts others don’t know or feelings others don’t understand. If a character makes a decision I don’t understand either as a player or as my character—well, that’s maybe the most interesting thing about TTRPGs to me.
I have some secrets simply because other characters haven’t asked. I have some secrets because I haven’t made sense of them yet. I have some secrets that I may never want other characters to know. I hope the other characters do too.

The characters in books and film would not be interesting if every decision they made was informed by the voice of an omniscient narrator. What they chose to do in light of their limited knowledge creates tension and moves the stories along. The same is true in role playing games. Usually this requires backchanneling between players or between individual players and the GM. That’s probably the biggest impediment for most players, but the possibilities it opens are fun and fascinating.

What did we see at the back of the cave? No one can agree. Did the rogue know the door was trapped? Of course not…right? Did the “traveling book merchant” just cast Knock? What is so unusual about the old ship? I didn’t see anything. Did you learn anything new from the Mayor? No?

Where is this story going? We’ll have to find out.

I want to discover

Knowing ahead of time—whether it’s knowing a creature's weakness, knowing who the BBEG is, or knowing the world map—turns TTRPGs from the co-creation of a unique story into something more like the NES Super Mario Bros game. If I just push the buttons in the right order with the right timing I can beat the game (which I never did, I’m horrible at that game).

Take Curse of Strahd…please.

Introduce as many side quests as you want, that adventure could go one of only a handful of ways:

1. The characters defeat Strahd after uncovering the necessary secrets and relics

2. The characters leave Ravenloft without defeating Strahd (if the DM lets them)

3. TPK!

4. The players disband before finishing the adventure

Ravenloft is a huge world, but playing Curse of Strahd is—for me—railroading. Can it still be fun to play Curse of Strahd? Yes. Scenario #4 would only be fun while it lasted, but even the TPK can be fun. Failure can be fun.

But scenario #1 in Curse of Strahd is the desired and expected outcome. Players achieve it by staying alive long enough to roll enough successes and damage on the dice. By pushing the Curse of Strahd buttons in the right order with the right timing.

That’s why I’m not really interested in seeing if I can beat Strahd.

For some players, knowing there is a BBEG—and maybe even knowing who it is from early on, in the case of Strahd—is part of what makes the game fun. It represents a recognizable goal with real stakes (in the context of the fiction). It’s inherently epic and maybe heroic. It's a moment when the credits will role.

This departure from real life—where there is no BBEG, no end credits, no heroic struggle—is why some players find TTRPGs fun. And I wouldn’t want to make the game less fun for them.

I want to do it together

Being a GM is hard and I know this can be frustrating. I once spent a good portion of a session exploring a boat and pestering passengers when, it turns out, the trip was intended to be simple transport and world building. Everyone at the table including the GM said it didn’t bother them…in my memory it took up almost the entire session. Anyway, the jokes and the tension of players going off into the weeds in a session or “ruining” a campaign are real.

There’s always a give and take between GMs and players and I don’t know that I can put my finger on the exact difference between the emergent storytelling of a Game Playing GM working together with players to create a new story and a GM tricking players into thinking a meticulously planned narrative is their idea.

Except to say that the reason that I don’t want to know—and that I want to suggest that you should try too—is that playing pretend with friends is fun when we’re equals, when we all share the spotlight, when all our needs are met, when we collectively unfurl the banner of a story that no one knows the end of.

We’re discovering the story as we play because it could only come from all of us.