Tabletop role-playing games, also known as TTRPGs, have a long history dating back to the 1970s. But it wasn’t until recently that tabletop gaming gained massive popularity with a steadily increasing player base. While TTRPGs are not inherently set in a specific time or place, many focus on the fantasy genre and a medieval setting. Thom Gobbitt of the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is one of many TTRPG enthusiasts and has been looking to combine his work as a medievalist and tabletop gamer.

But how do tabletop role-playing games work? The base for most games is a single person who acts as the storyteller, and around 2–6 other players. The storyteller (also known as the game master) has the important job of describing the world, the people, and the obstacles the other players can interact with. Many game masters use maps and miniatures to aid their story, but ultimately TTRPGs take place in your imagination. They are never a linear gaming experience - every system has different rules, and every group focuses on different experiences. Some people might favor intense battle scenes, while others flourish in social settings.

Playing and Studying the Middle Ages 

What aspects of pen and paper games are you hoping to study?

Thom Gobbitt: There are three core areas that I want to look at within the overall umbrella of the gamification of the early Middle Ages. The first one is the perception of the medieval past in role-play games, which really has two main subdivisions. One of them is the question of accuracy, and the other is the question of authenticity. Accuracy means “the past that is being presented here fits in with a historian's view of the past.” Authenticity is focused more on the popular perspective. The author Terry Pratchett used to give a great example of this, writing a book set in the Middle Ages and calling your lead character Tiffany. Even though Tiffany was a very popular name in the Middle Ages, none of your audience will accept that, because everybody knows that Tiffany is a name from the 1920s.

Accuracy means “the past that is being presented here fits in with a historian's view of the past.”

The second major question that I want to look at is pedagogy. How can a role-play game be used for teaching and for dissemination of research findings? And the third one is research itself. To what extent can we use games as a tool to support academic research?

Dungeons and Dragons is the most known pen and paper game, but it is by far not the only one. How do you decide which games to include in your research?

Gobbitt: There are so many games out there, but there are significantly fewer which have a specifically medieval focus. I think one of the big answers to the question of which ones to choose is: what's interesting and what's useful? And I'm trying to expand beyond just the Western Europe focus and hoping to bring in a view that's going to look from Eastern Europe all the way across into China, on the one hand, and then more around the Mediterranean Basin, Northern Africa at the least, and the Middle East.

The medieval can’t just stop as a geographical line.

You make an interesting point. What time period and places are mostly represented or even overrepresented when discussing the Middle Ages?

Gobbitt: So, obviously the medieval period should be somewhere from around the fourth or fifth century to about the 15th century - a span of a thousand years. But the number of publications set in each century pretty much increases rapidly from the latest, with the huge peak being in the late Middle Ages. So my wanting to study the early Middle Ages is already making things difficult for myself. And there is a definite favoring towards Western Europe. But the medieval can’t just stop as a geographical line, especially in a role-playing game where you might be based in Italy and one of your characters instantly says, "I'm going to go across the mountains," or "I'm going to take a boat," and now they're in Jerusalem. This is another good reason to use tabletop role-play gaming for investigating sources, because players go beyond the limits of what you can imagine as a games master or storyteller.

Historical Accuracy in Tabletop Games

How important is historical accuracy in tabletop games?

Gobbitt: This is a really, really big question. For me, it’s like going to the cinema and watching a film set in the past. There is great fun to be had in pointing out what's not historically accurate, but you can still enjoy the film regardless. In the same sense, I would say role-playing games don't need to be historically accurate. Your primary goal here is to have fun. But as a medieval historian studying that genre, how important is accuracy? I think the question isn't about whether or not a game is accurate, but how the idea of historical accuracy is brought into the game. But also, again from the research and teaching side, how can we bring historically accurate information in to the tabletop roleplaying game if we want to use it as a means to teach or even to disseminate scholarly findings?

The question isn't about whether or not a game is accurate, but how the idea of historical accuracy is brought into the game.

Where are you currently at, and what are the next steps for your projects?

Gobbitt: At the moment, this project is a friendly discussion group to get key papers down that are interesting and relevant. Then, I've got my game I'm writing myself around the Lombard laws, and consolidating in the middle of all this are plans for a larger research project, which is in very early stages at the moment.