Tabletop Games part 1: How they can become personal mini fandoms

Due to my love for both writing and general nerd stuff, I'm naturally drawn to tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Me and a group of my friends come together to make characters, fight villains and tell our own personal story with character development, emotional beats and massive payoffs. In my mind it is one of the greatest methods of storytelling due to how personal and intimate it is and how it reflects the roots of humans telling stories to each other. Due to the stories in question only being shared within a small group of people, one would think that most discussion of it would begin and end at the table, but that's where it gets interesting.

While I have not actively played in a campaign for a little while, I have fond memories of the ones I did participate in. And some of the most fond memories were actually in conversations between sessions. Much like how a new episode of a serialised drama might end on a cliffhanger, the dungeon master that ran the game for us would sometimes end a session with a new villain showing up, a grand revelation or when combat is just about to start. This would then spark discussion between us about what might happen next and what we might want our characters to do.

This kind of discussion brings to mind fandoms, and how they may react to a new episode of a show or a big plot twist. In this way, us as the players can be considered a mini-fandom of this story. While there's obviously no footage to make edits of or fans of the story making art of our characters, I've found myself imagining that sort of thing based on characters and events. I often found that if I saw an edit online and the song made me think of my or someone else's character I'd think about what an edit of them with that song might look like. These tabletop games can even act as a gateway into connecting through other fandoms. In talking about friendship and community in tabletop games, Boon wrote:

"In TTRPG communities of practice this often took the form of verbally referencing television shows, movies, music, books, games and online communities through quotations, comparisons to current experiences or events, or by directly asking if people knew of (x) show, movie, book, etc. Not only did this allow people to geek-out together and discuss their favourite shows, movies, etc., but it also allowed others to signal their connections or involvement in these fandoms"

(Boon, 2022)

Oftentimes in fandom you can see some overlap. Fans of one show might naturally be drawn to another and there can be cross-fandom interaction. Tabletop games can end up being a natual boiling pot of all sorts of fandoms. It's common rhetoric that there's no such thing as an original story anymore, which has some truth to it. We all put ourselves and our inspirations into the stories we write, but that applies to tabletop characters as well. When you have anywhere from 3 to 8 different people making different characters all inspired by both different and similar things, it invites comparison and can foster interaction and community.

For example, my most recent character Minnari was inspired by supernatual detectives like Hellboy or John Constantine but had the personality of a young arrogant upstart like Jake Peralta. This invited comparison and when people made comparisons both to those things and other pieces of media my character made them think of, it helped us grow closer. Our mini-fandom for our characters and this story we were telling ended up overlapping with other fandoms and we even ended up discovering that we were fans of things that we hadn't talked about yet despite being friends for over 2 years at that point. Every character that each of us made was inspired by other things and now those characters can act as further inspiration for more characters we make in turn.

Tabletop games not only helped me and my friends grow closer in general, but through this mini-fandom that we created, we ended up interacting and growing closer through both our fandom for these stories and the things that inspired our characters. And while I haven't played in a while I am writing up ideas for my own campaign and no matter who I play with I hope it fosters a mini-fandom just as good as previous campaigns where I participated as a player.

Bibliography:

Boon, D. (2022) It's Dangerous to Go Alone: an Enthohraphy of Friendship Through Tabletop Gaming Communities of Practice. PhD Thesis. Carleton University. Available at: https://repository.library.carleton.ca/concern/etds/70795866t (Accessed: 15/04/2025)