Welcome to this microdose by ACFM. When the gang and I were preparing for the full trip

episode on games, Jeremy referred to TTRPGs a lot to which I thought WTF. TTRGPs I discovered

is the acronym for table top role-playing games. This will be familiar to some of you who

play these games, but not to many others who perhaps like me didn't grow up in an Anglo-American

world or were too busy enjoying life in the outside world to spend their early twenties

crowding round a table indoors pretending to be someone else. Harsh, I know. So without further

ado, for the first time on a microdose, both my weird and esteemed colleagues Jeremy Gilbert

and Kea Melbourne are joining me, Nadia Idol for this full complement microdose on table top role-playing

games, what they are, where they came from and why they matter. So guys, have I got the wrong

end of the stick or are table top playing games played indoors around the table? Before we get

to that, let's correct something in your spiel. I didn't spend my early twenties playing TTRPGs,

I spent my early teens playing. Yeah, early teens, both of us. By the time I was in my twenties,

I'd sort of wish I could play them, but it was basically not possible because they weren't cool enough.

This is good. I thought this was an older person thing. So where do you guys want to start? Do you

want to start by building the picture of how this game has played? Or do you want to start talking

about who plays it? We'll say first what they are, but yeah, basically the phrase table top role-playing

game, it refers to what for the first 20 or 30 years of their existence were just called role-playing

games. By far the most famous version of which is Dungeons and Dragons, they started to be called

table top role-playing games about 20 years ago to differentiate them from online role-playing games,

from video role-playing games. Once people started to talk about certain kinds of computer games,

that's role-playing games, and of course ironically, especially post-pandemic, like most table top

role-playing games are played on Zoom or something, but we still refer to them as table top role-playing

...