Addicted to Dreams

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suggest that most of us who play or referee roleplaying games are readers first. Before we ever picked up polyhedral dice or scribbled on a character sheet, we had books – paperbacks with cracked spines and lurid covers, library copies borrowed and re-borrowed, pages filled with strange names, lost cities, and impossible creatures. It was through those stories that many of us first discovered the wonder of other worlds. I know I did. Long before I ever rolled a saving throw, I’d already learned what it meant to lose myself in another place, to be consumed by imagination, to live elsewhere, if only for a time.

That hunger – to be elsewhere – never really fades. It lingers in the back of the mind, calling us to dream again. It’s what drives writers to put pen to paper and referees to sketch maps or invent pantheons. It’s an act of creation born, at least in part, from dissatisfaction with the ordinary. In a way, it’s a quiet rebellion against the everyday, the only kind of rebellion a stick in the mud like me is capable of. The schoolyard and the shopping mall are all well and good, but they pale beside Moria or Melniboné. The imagination whispers, “There are other worlds than these,” and, once you’ve heard that whisper, it’s impossible not to believe it.

When I first discovered roleplaying games, what drew me in (though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time) was their invitation to take that same imaginative impulse, the one that led me to daydream in church or stare at the horizon as if something wondrous might appear and share it. Writing, for all its pleasures, is solitary, even lonely. It’s a private communion between the writer and the page. But RPGs opened the door to something altogether different, a kind of collaborative dreaming. Around the table, the game became a campfire and we were the storytellers gathered in its glow, shaping a dream together, speaking it aloud so that others could live in it too.

That’s the real magic of roleplaying. I hesitate to say that, because it can sound sentimental or pretentious, but it’s true nonetheless. Roleplaying lets us touch the same creative fire that first called us to stories: the power to imagine not just what is, but what could be. In that moment, we become co-authors of our own mythologies. The settings we build, the characters we play, even the dice we roll are all tools for bending reality toward something richer, stranger, and truer to that inner sense of wonder that first made us turn a page.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question I asked myself yesterday. Why did stuck with RPGs for all these decades when most of my childhood friends did not? I don’t keep playing out of nostalgia or habit. I keep playing because, even now, I’m still addicted to dreams. Roleplaying games give that addiction shape and fellowship. They remind me that imagination isn’t a childish escape, but one of the most human acts of all. It’s our ability to make meaning, to build worlds, to see beyond what’s immediately before us and, in doing so, to bring a little of those other worlds back with us.

In the end, that’s what the best games and the best stories both do. They invite us to live for a while in another world and then return to this one with new eyes, eyes that still, even after all these years, look to the horizon and wonder what might lie beyond.