The best videogame RPGs are really tabletop RPGs in disguise—and that might just be their secret sauce

At PC Gamer we occasionally run tabletop RPG campaigns remotely, with senior editor Robin Valentine as our long-suffering GM. I like to think of my role as 'agent of chaos'—all scrapes and japes.

Maybe I'll sacrifice myself to save everyone on a dying space station. Maybe I'll betray everyone and kill a former guides editor. Maybe I'll just derail a Star Wars-themed RPG by constantly describing how bad my Duros character smells (it's all in the lore, folks).

I adore the messy antics, but equally I am smitten with how weird our stories get, as a bunch of very extra writers fill out a yarn, constantly in conversation with a GM and each other. It's so much more liberating and surprising than a prescriptive videogame RPG.

But while I am adamant that the best roleplaying experiences take place around a table (or Discord), videogame RPGs still manage to capture much of what makes this more pure roleplaying style so bloody compelling. Indeed, it's often what makes the best of them so brilliant.

The Elder Scrolls is not an obvious example at first glance, but Bethesda's 30-year-old series owes a huge debt to D&D and its ilk—for so many reasons, really, but particularly because of their free-wheeling, 'there's an adventure around every corner' nature. Whether you're a Skyrim addicts, you're engaging with a fantasy world in much the same way as you would be while hunched around a table, rolling dice.

Mountaineering

The world of Tamriel isn't a million miles away from the Forgotten Realms, and D&D has given videogame RPGs much of their vocabulary, but it's this less defined vibe that really harkens back to tabletops. That sense of randomness, of experimentation. That immersive sim quality.

When you escape the devastation of Helgen in Skyrim, you immediately begin a conversation with an invisible GM. "OK, where now?" The answer is entirely up to you. Muck around in ancient tombs. Chase down thieves. Find some dragons to fuck up. Rush straight towards the important stuff. No matter what you choose, Bethesda will make an adventure out of it for you.

If you decide to hoof it to Whiterun, you'll immediately encounter a brawl between the Fighters Guild and a giant. A more prescriptive RPG would make this feel like a critical encounter that you absolutely must engage with. But like a tabletop game, Skyrim treats this like another conversation. "What would you actually like to do?"

Maybe you'll go down the vanilla route and help the fighters, after which they'll invite you to inquire about ing their ranks by visiting their HQ, giving you a new quest and setting you on a long, wide-ranging adventure that will eventually transform you into a werewolf. But you also might accidentally wallop someone with your sword as you try to hack at the giant, and whoops, now you're fighting your would-be allies too.

You are co-writing your story in tandem with Bethesda.

Or you could just say "Screw it" and hang back, watching the spectacle. Heck, you can simply ignore it entirely and find a new adventure, because warriors and giants are a bit basic, aren't they?

You are co-writing your story in tandem with Bethesda, but in a free-flowing way that eschews the very specific choices you make in other RPGs. Big Choices are a huge part of videogame RPGs, but increasingly I find them vapid and by-the-numbers. The Elder Scrolls works so well because it's less about the hugely important moments where you're faced with a binary decision, and more about the understated, moment-to-moment chaos. Which is also what makes them feel so much more connected to the ancient legacy of TTRPGs.

It's fascinating how BioWare, which until very recently was responsible for the greatest explicit D&D adaptation, Baldur's Gate 2, has so thoroughly moved away from the things that make tabletop gaming such a trip.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, for instance, only makes you a participant in its adventures. You and your companions have very little in the way of real agency. You are given a few directions to go in, a few extremely important choices, but so much of it is illusory. At no point are you writing your own story. You're merely following BioWare's very specific narrative.

Of course, the BioWare that made Baldur's Gate 2 (or really any of the good RPGs) is long gone, but into that vacuum plenty of other developers have enthusiastically leaped, and continued making wonderful RPGs. And it's thanks to this that we have Baldur's Gate 3.

Baldur's crate

Now, yes, clearly BG3 draws from tabletop games. It's so obvious that you might think it's pointless for me to even bring the game up. It's literally a D&D game. But Larian did so much more than transpose the setting and rules to a videogame world. It latched onto the raw philosophy of tabletop gaming. It caught that intangible spirit, nurtured it, elevated it, and ultimately gave us something that was equal to the greatest campaigns you might have played with your tabletop cohorts.

Critical to this was the way that Larian so thoroughly embraced immersive sim concepts. Creative problem solving, reactive systems, player agency, emergent gameplay—these are the pillars of the immersive sim, but they are equally the pillars of tabletop roleplaying.

Through this, Larian was able to lean into the strengths of these two modes of play. It's how, when you play BG3, you really do feel like you can try anything, pushing the rules to their breaking point, even though videogames, by their very nature, cannot truly offer the same levels of freedom as a game driven almost purely by imagination. The principles of immersive sim design are like a cheat sheet, allowing developers to create an almost unbreakable illusion that you, the player, have an unfettered ability to manipulate the world.

Arguably one of the purest expressions of this is the way you can physically manipulate the space you inhabit. You can, for instance, weaponise the humble crate in all sorts of ways in the midst of battle, or you can simply stack them up, climb them, and then use spells or items to teleport yourself over seemingly imible barriers.

It's so important to be able to decide how you make your way through the world.

Nobody tells you that you can do this. There's no tutorial that suggests, "Yo, if you stack some boxes you can by some of our carefully crafted obstacles". But you can do it, because it makes sense in a world where you can teleport to things within your line of sight. It fits the logic of the game perfectly—you just need to think creatively.

And this is just incredible. Joyful. And just a bit silly. It also makes BG3 a much better RPG than most of its predecessors and contemporaries—because it's so important to be able to decide how you make your way through the world. These are the choices that really matter. How you use your imagination and creativity to make the tools you're given work for you.

This isn't something you get just because you're playing a game set in the Forgotten Realms. The Infinity Engine games didn't let you do this shit. Dark Alliance didn't let you do it, either. This was down to Larian making a choice about how it took advantage of tabletop-inspired systems. And it was doing it even before it got the D&D gig. This is classic Divinity: Original Sin nonsense.

But it's not the only route to creating a phenomenal RPG; nor is it the only way that tabletop RPGs can inspire better videogames.

Disco never dies

Disco Elysium is one of the most important videogame RPGs ever made, and effectively reimagines what an RPG can be. Should be. And while I think it could only have been made by the specific people who made up ZAUM's team—now scattered to the winds—with all their specific experiences and obsessions, I don't think it could have existed without tabletop roleplaying, either.

"I think I met Robert [Kurvitz, ZAUM co-founder] when I was 17 or something," art director Aleksander Rostov told Edge five years ago. "Before that, you'd hear these whispers going around about some crazy dudes who were doing this weird obsessive D&D thing that wasn't about dwarves and elves but motor carriages and people wearing top hats. It was like steampunk, but not vanilla steampunk, it was inspired by the French Revolution. When I got the materials, the photos of the characters and the maps, in person, it was like, 'Oh, shit, this is the stuff'."

Disco was specifically designed to evoke AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons), but with a distinctly different setting, and drawing on D&D-inspired videogames like Planescape: Torment. Initially there was going to be combat, but it eventually shed that. But that makes it feel no less like a tabletop game.

While D&D is partially defined by its creative, violent encounters, tabletop gaming is so much wider in scope. I've been playing tabletop games for a couple of decades (I started late), and while violence often plays a big role, combat itself doesn't rear its head very often.

While D&D is partially defined by its creative and violent encounters, tabletop gaming is so much wider in scope.

Tabletop roleplaying is more about embodying a character, and then using their skills in conjunction with your own brain, your creativity, to push a story forward, solving problems and achieving a range of goals that can be literally anything. You don't need guns or swords or classes for that—they just form a helpful framework.

And few games let you embody a character like Disco does. Harry is not the player—he's more defined than that. But Disco does invite and encourage us to become Harry. And then to decide who Harry will become with our assistance. Instead of combat, we are in constant conversation with his psyche, his addictions, his worst and best impulses. In a sense we are at war with ourself, or at least our digital counterpart.

I still get all tingly thinking about how good that feels. How exciting it is to explore a character this deeply. And it really, truly does match the experience of figuring out who you are in a TTRPG. The way Disco swaps the conventional RPG skills and modifiers for more esoteric fare and out-there dialogue options—including conversations with the voices in our head—ends up perfectly replicating the way we interrogate ourselves when trying to figure out how to handle a situation on the table.

When I encounter an obstacle in, say, D&D, or Mothership, or Call of Cthulhu, I'm not simply looking at my inventory or my character sheet's list of skills and traits, I'm also thinking about how Fancy Jones, Doderick Soup or Whisper (or whatever ridiculous name I've cursed my character with) would approach the situation. Am I stressed? Am I worried about my companions? Do I have a really strange and hyper-specific fetish for space station power generators?

Or these things might come from the GM, as they remind me that I am actually soaked head-to-toe in blood as I try to talk my way out of a tricky situation, which is maybe going to have an impact. Which might prompt me to lean into the lunacy of it all, like Harry committing entirely to a bit, whether that's being a paranormal investigator or relentlessly telling people, "I am the law". And just like a permissive GM, Disco will often reward you for being a complete nutjob.

Bite the hand

Then there's the playfulness. The way games like Disco, BG3 or The Elder Scrolls encourage you to mess around rather than looking for the optimal path. More conventional RPGs encourage us to 'win', but the truly great ones let us have fun failing, or at the very least take weird risks.

It's probably not a good idea to bite off Gale's hand in a BG3 Dark Urge playthrough, or to headbutt the massive racist guarding the docks in Disco or to stab a story-critical NPC in the face in Morrowind, but god is it fun. And there are so many occasions where going down the less obvious path, or just fucking around, will actually pay off.

That might really be at the very heart of what makes TTRPGs so wonderful, and why games that draw from this philosophy really sing. You get to indulge yourself. Do way too many drugs in front of your straight-laced friend. Entice a bunch of murderous giants into a peaceful village. Sacrifice countless druids and nice refugees just so you can maybe score a date with a hot drow priestess.

You can play a monstrous serial killer, an agent of chaos, a hot mess, or just constantly do the wrong things over and over again, and the game's still got your back. Like a GM with a soft spot for your absolute nonsense, the best RPGs have your back and will give you some great stories, even if you're being a complete tool.

This is the secret sauce of a truly incredible RPG.

And while I've focussed on three of my favourites here, there are so many brilliant RPGs that get this, that use the foundations of tabletop roleplaying to do something special.

There's the old-school TTRPG purity of Caves of Qud, with its potent combo of TTRPG freedom and simulation-heavy world generation.

When videogame RPGs recognise the dizzying potential of both their TTRPG forebears and contemporaries, they tap into a magic more powerful than anything your lad Elminster can summon: a spell woven from player ingenuity, living stories and systems that, at all times, put the people using them first. This is the secret sauce of a truly incredible RPG.