What it Means to Create Player Characters for Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Focusing on Setting a Character's Gender and History (Japanese only)

Abstract

Tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) allow players to freely create their own player characters. We conducted an exploratory study of the significance of this fact for players through two studies: An interview survey and field observations. As a result, we found that players create player characters of different genders from their own, becoming different from their usual selves. They create a TRPG community that includes not only the players but also their player characters, which supports the role-playing. The fact that the findings of this study were obtained from a very limited community is a limitation of this study.