For this assignment I made a podcast going about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games and how more and more people are using digital mediums to play them.

---

Transcript

“Hello and welcome back to Big Bad Evil Podcast, I as always am your host Aiden D’Antuono and today for our first episode we’ve got a great discussion on how the internet influences how we play Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games. So let’s get started and roll for initiative.

So when we think of a game of D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu or any other Tabletop Roleplaying Games, I think the image most people think of is a group of friends gathered around a table, dice in hand, with little or not so little painted miniatures battling it out. It’s the stereotypical idea of a TTRPG session but how accurate is this stereotype in the present day?

Well it might not be as accurate as you think, according to a study undertaken by Wizards of the Coast, the current publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, 60 percent of its players play both in-person and online. And that figure doesn’t even include the percentage of groups that only play online.

But there is more, Roll20 a popular a web based virtual tabletop that can be used to run TTRPGs reported in 2022 that they had more than 10 million users. That is a lot of people. To put that into some perspective Roll20 has more users than the entire state of Virginia. Even if a sizeable percentage of that number are made up of inactive accounts or alt accounts it is still a shocking number.

This goes to show that the old view of how TTRPGs are played isn’t so true anymore. Sure it still happens but increasingly people have been turning to online mediums for their games. And I think this will have a massive impact on the culture of TTRPG community as a whole. Increased usage of digital technology will inevitably result in shifts in the culture and I’m interested to see where it heads.

So you’ve heard what I think but what about you? How do you think the internet has affected tabletop gaming? Do you have any personal experience in this topic? Or maybe you disagree entirely? Let us know in the comments below.

Well that’s all we have for today. Make sure to join us next time for a longer podcast on character creation and how to work with your GM and other players to make an interesting and compelling character that fits in the world, the campaign, and the party. Until then this has been Big Bad Evil Podcast.”