#Digital tabletop pinball machine series#

Given the first couple of sessions are pretty much supplied to you, there's even an argument that it's pick up and play. There's clearly a concerted effort for this to be the case, and to avoid some of the laborious preparation that goes into running D&D games. It's even suggested that the person running the game chooses the classes - the Paragons - people play, because some of them come with powers like being able to convince someone to do anything, which can be problematic if wielded in an immature way.ĭespite all that that implied heaviness, though, DIE seems really light in terms of getting it up and running to play. To me it seems like the book is laying out a whole framework for mature, collaborative storytelling play, which I'm really excited by - complete with many safe-play suggestions to enable it, too. This can obviously play on quite powerful potential themes, and it's those deeper questions, those deeper role-playing possibilities, I feel DIE is really trying to get at. Say your Persona has wanted to be something in their 'real' life: their Paragon can be it. And this sets up all kinds of powerful role-playing opportunities. Get this, for example: you don't play as one character in the game, you play as two: as a Persona (the person playing the TTRPG) and as a Paragon (the character in the TTRPG). This game, then, represents something of a new vision for a TTRPG experience, and I'm fascinated by the ideas in it. Then, they Kickstarted it, and copies of the book are currently shipping to backers - backers like me.

He then took all of this thinking and, with the help of tabletop RPG experts Rowan, Rook and Decard, made a proper TTRPG game out of it.

That's why you'll find, in the back pages of the comic, essays by him where he unpicks an experience like Dungeons & Dragons and rethinks what it could be. Gillen needed an in-comic game for it to all be based on, though, so he set about creating one all of his own.

#Digital tabletop pinball machine series#

DIE is a series about a group of people who were sucked into a tabletop role-playing game as teenagers, before finding their way out only to be sucked back in, years later, all over again. He went on to co-found Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but left games journalism to pursue a career writing comics, and it turned out he was bloody good at it, earning him employment from companies like Marvel.įast-forward a few years and Gillen has co-created and launched a few original series of his own, including the brilliant The Wicked + The Divine, and, to get to the point, DIE. I'm breaking the rules slightly in that I haven't actually played this yet, but it is a game I want to play, and it is a game I've been reading - or rather a game-book I've been reading in the interests of playing it.ĭIE is co-created and written by Kieron Gillen who, if you've been around Eurogamer long enough, you might remember writing for the site. Watch on YouTube DIE: The Roleplaying Game.