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By Root 363 0

of players that connects those wishing to play D&D with others. Pre-made adventures are released specifically for the RPGA, and players create characters that they run in multiple RPGA adventures. However, these episodes are more isolated than the episodes in the world of Sorpraedor and may involve different characters and a different DM each session. I observed an RPGA game at D&D Experience, an annual convention for RPGA players. The characters in the game I observed were high-level indicating that players had been building these characters in multiple adventures. However, they had not played them together continually the way the party in Sorpraedor had continued together. Instead, these players came from different areas of the country to meet at D&D Experience and game together. There were many games going continually at the convention, each lasting approximately six hours. When one game concluded, gamers would take their characters and join a new adventure or switch to a new DM.

The pre-made adventure, or module, that I observed being played at D&D Experience had not been available outside of the convention and is not available to members outside the RPGA. It belonged to a larger campaign setting of the Forgotten Realms. This setting is published through rule books published by Wizards of the Coast and many gamers use it as a world for their adventures, both in home adventures and pre-made modules. However, the players indicated that the RPGA added some consistency to this world and that modules often built on each other to create a fuller world view. Thus, some players knew interesting facts about other areas of the Forgotten Realms because of previous adventuring experiences. Because of their lack of previous relationships, the characters and players in this adventure remained far more anonymous than in the Sorpraedor campaign. Often, they were referred to only by character class or category. For example, the DM might ask what the dwarf would do next rather than naming the character, with whom he might not be familiar. Thus, I will not list character and player names for this adventure as I have for those in the ongoing Sorpraedor campaign.

While I could not participate in the D&D Experience game because I was not an RPGA member, I did participate in several other one-time games for comparison. At both NC State Game Day in 2004 and at Worldwide D&D Game Day in May 2009, I played a pre-generated character in a pre-made adventure. I also attempted to DM a pre-made, one-shot adventure in a home setting in order to more successfully compare the experience of playing versus running a game. These diverse experiences allow me to comment further on the commonalities and differences between playing and running D&D in an ongoing homebrew campaign and in a pre-made, one-time adventure. However, as I elaborate on further, the distinctions are not always as clear cut, particularly when ongoing campaigns incorporate pre-made adventures as well.

To go beyond my own experiences I also frequented online gaming forums and distributed an online survey, which was made available through several of these forums. The forums that I observed were not specific to D&D and thus allowed me to gain the perspective of gamers who might be more involved with a different TRPG or even a different type of roleplaying. My survey asked participants to specify which types of role-playing they participated in and to further identify what they saw as the differences between computer role-playing and tabletop role-playing. Interestingly, 97 percent of the respondents participated in TRPGs, leading me to believe that forums designed for “role-playing games” were designed more for TRPG players than for other types of role-players (an assumption that was confirmed by the content of the postings in these communities). Because my focus here is on the TRPG, I did not distribute the survey to members of other communities that focused more on online or computer role-playing; however, 45 percent of my respondents also played computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and