Joe is a multi-class Teacher/Game Designer/PhD Student from Canterbury in the UK. His scholarly and creative projects focus on tabletop role-playing games while his teaching is an eclectic mix of Biosciences, History and Classical Civilisation, though not normally to the same class. His PhD project is on the literary nature of TRPG (Tabletop Roleplaying Games) and TRPG books, and is being undertaken at Canterbury Christ Church University, where it sits neatly between the Game Studies and Creative Writing departments. He teaches A levels and Btecs at College Canterbury, and his creative projects are published through Canterbury Games Studio Ltd. He’d argue his greatest fear is running out of things to do, but that seems unlikely to happen. You can contract him via email at Ja588@canterbury.ac.uk.

Author’s Note: “With special thanks to Jan Stanek for his help as first reader, proofreader, and general writing assistant.

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Introduction

Tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons are characterised by their changing and evolving storyworlds. The kernel of these worlds often comes from the game books or are inspired by fiction in other media such as novels or television. But it is the collaborative process of play which shapes and grows that storyworld into a unique one experienced by a particular group. Some of these worlds are played in for years or even decades (Macgregor 2022) and understanding how these worlds are formed, shaped, and changed is of interest to scholars of game studies. I am interested in theorising about how the mechanism of collaborative play shapes the storyworld of the game over time. This essay is focused on one particular tool that many player groups use to shape and grow their storyworlds, that of the gameplay wiki. I shall look at how TRPGs can be treated as text and thus how the different ways wikis can work as a paratext to help players collaborate and shape their storyworlds.

Players regularly take notes during tabletop games: from writing up story elements, to recording lists of loot, to developing character backstories and fictionalising play. These notes form a record of play, reinforcing but also modifying the recollections of players, and through that become a paratext shaping further play. Prior to the digital age, this was a personal experience. The GM’s (game master: the player-participant who takes the role of organiser and narrator for the tabletop game, managing the non-protagonist elements) note cards did not cross paths with the players’ annotated character sheets.

With the internet came the ability to share and collaborate on creation, and gamers gravitated to wikis and similar co-creator platforms to do so. Sites sprang up to cater to this demand. The largest is Obsidian Portal, where I have focused my research. The key elements of these wikis are the personalisation they allow in how information is displayed and organised and the fact that they are collaborative public documents. Information is brought together in the medium of the wiki, focused on game content but without the myriad social interactions of the game table. These factors transform them from being tools of note-taking and organisation into methods of expression and display of the storyworld, methods that players use to remediate game experiences in a way for them to have a desired impact on later game sessions. Wikis are therefore a purposeful paratext. This is not the only role of the wiki, as they can be a venue for play and provide additional participatory elements and thus form part of the primary text. But given their evolution from digital note taking, I would regard the paratextual role as their primary one.

This essay draws from existing theory, my experience as a wiki writer, and a review of the top forty most visited game wikis on Obsidian Portal (circa December 2022) to show how wikis are used in TRPGs to define and contextualise the storyworld as paratext. There are a huge variety of campaign wikis. My observations reflect widespread trends rather than iron-hard rules. When I use the term wiki, I refer to wikis used and created by people playing a tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) to support their play, rather than the manifold examples of fan wikis for games and storyworlds that also exist.

TRPG as Text

For there to be a paratext, there must be (a) text. The most widely accepted model of TRPG play as text is to consider a gameplay session as a form of ergodic cybertext (Jara and Torner 2016), similar to how numerous scholars treat digital games. Ergodic text requires performative effort to read (Aarseth 1997). The actions of the players meet that requirement. Cybertext requires a ‘computational engine’ that interacts with the reader; the game system, the GM, and the interactions of the players form the engine that shapes the text.

From that basis, I want to look at two academic approaches to the composition of TRPG game texts that are relevant when looking at wikis.

The first is Jessica Hammer’s work on the authorship of the gameplay text. In this model, she outlines the stages of authorship that contribute to creating the final game session text (Hammer 2007).

These stages are not rigid divisions but overlapping spheres of interaction with an individual able to take up various roles. Hammer emphasises the collaborative authorship of the tertiary stage as the one where the unique storyworld of gameplay is both authored and read by the players. That the tertiary authors are also readers lines up with the concept of a cybertext.

The second useful perspective is Harviainen’s Hermeneutic breakdown of a game session (Harviainen 2008). He views the text of gameplay as a set of layers that we can examine the text in relation to. At the bottom is the diegetic layer in which the storyworld exists. It is a layer the players approach but never reach. Next is the in-character layer, where players try to embody their characters and their diegetic agenda. Above that is the ludic layer, where game mechanics and out-of-character play exists. The final layer is the social layer which embodies the world outside the game, where the act of play involves a group of friends engaged in a social activity, and where the real-world constraints on play happen. These layers are tools that allow us to analyse the play experience as text, whilst the wiki works as a means of shaping these layers acting as a paratext. In this approach, paratext is any element that frames the context in which the players act as ‘authors/readers’ without being a direct part of the action of play.

A Wiki as a Paratext

Obsidian Portal wikis have a generic structure, which divides elements into game-relevant subheadings. The website operates on a freemium model where paying customers gain access to more features.

A wiki’s structure is inherently paratextual: it controls the font, the scope of the visible text, how art and images are displayed, and is inclusive of all the elements of classical paratext as outlined by Genette (2001). These facets are determined by the wiki’s code, the display of the created text is constrained by those limits. Many forms of wiki, including Obsidian Portal, come with a pre-generated format for organising information. In Obsidian Portal’s case this is a selection of TRPG related sections e.g. Adventure Logs, Character Sheets, Maps, etc. This does not dictate what editors write, but it does directly compartmentalise  information and impose a structure on how a reader navigates it. Since this affects reception of the text without changing its content, this too is paratextual. Given the flexibility of wikis, it is possible to get around this preset organisation, but editors doing so are still responding to the initial structure and are limited to what the underlying code allows, so their work is still being influenced by this intrinsic paratext.

In my review of the 40 most popular campaign wikis, I found that 67% used CSS code to personalise the wiki layout. A smaller percentage (55%) changed how a reader navigates the contents. There are two barriers to using CSS: first, a financial one; only paid users can apply CSS, and second, a limit of skill since using CSS is a non-trivial task. Bearing this in mind, I believe it is reasonable to assume there are more users who would like to use CSS than do so. There is no functional requirement to use CSS since the base wiki serves perfectly well for information storage and retrieval. CSS is for stylistic changes and to express a creative and artistic agenda. The wikis I surveyed used art and graphic elements throughout; 1 in 4 had original art or graphic elements created just for that wiki rather than stock or publicly available material, and 1 in 4 included an audiovisual (AV) element, such as music links, animation, or embedded video. Taken together, this supports the idea that these wikis can be more than digital replacements for game notes but can be an extension and reflection of the creative agenda of the text of play. This means the wiki moves from being just a record of the game to including a creative remediation of events, including both audio and graphic elements, that changes how previous play is received in future game sessions, turning it into a paratext.

A key model for considering wikis as paratexts is David Jara’s gensic framing (Jara 2021). Jara examined RPG rulebooks as a paratext. Specifically, he looked at how the various elements of the book, such as its rules, setting, as well as art, font, and layout, worked to shape how the readers approach playing the game. Like Hammer, he does not give the writers of the rulebooks definitive authority over the storyworld but presents them as contributors whose work is an incomplete frame without the game being played.

Many of the elements that Jara identifies in rulebook frames apply to wikis, including: art font, world description, rules materials, along with wiki-specific elements, such as embedded AV material and records of play. It is reasonable to see these wikis working in the same way, creating a frame that shapes player experience. What makes wikis distinct is their positioning in the domains of authorship described by Hammer. Rulebooks fall under primary authorship. Wikis created by the GM and players fall under secondary and tertiary authorship. Their creation both precedes play and also continues in response to it. Rulebooks are a received paratext, carrying the values and framing developed by the game designer. A wiki represents a paratext shaped by the GM and players. Wikis can echo elements from rulebooks through art, font, or other content, such as rule snippets and setting material; but this represents a choice by the player group to embrace and emphasise those elements, not just receive and react. In other circumstances, a wiki might represent a tool for deliberately moving away from the framing of the rulebook to create something new, reacting against the framing of the primary authors. The wiki, as a purposefully created paratext, supplants that of the primary authors (the rulebook) going on to frame future sessions of play and moving forward in a way that aligns with the desires of the tertiary authors (the players).

Example Wikis

For example, here is a wiki I studied as part of my top 40 wiki review: Shadows over New York (Keryth987 et al.).

It is a wiki for a campaign of the Dresden Files RPG (Balsera et al., 2010) which is based on the novel series of the same name (Spencer et al.). The authors of the rulebook grounded it within the novel’s setting by making the game book a diegetic artefact through the use of marginal notes written by the novel’s characters. As a paratext, it aims to frame gameplay as an extension of the original book series to get players to emulate the ‘feel’ of the novels and the setting.

Shadows over New York aims for something different—framing the game as an urban fantasy TV show which draws from the Dresden Files but also shares a universe with other TV series. The wiki uses real-world images of the ‘actors’ who play both primary characters and NPCs. Its campaign log is presented as a series of TV episodes in a season-long arc. It uses AV elements, both real (such as season theme songs), and faux (such as a non-functioning ‘play’ button for looking at game logs).

As a paratext, this challenges, or at least contextualises, the framing from the rulebook, shaping the expectations and reception of the story by the players as well as how they summarise and recollect it. There are numerous examples of this process. For example, in the HarnMaster wiki Signs and Portents campaign (Ketherian et al.), the GM has written a folk song to accompany the adventure logs to emphasise the character’s reputation within the diegesis of the storyworld.

Another good exemplar is the Coldfall Sanction wiki (Nicholsvictoria2) where the players write up their logs as in-character ‘mission reports’. This shapes how players think about and recollect the events of a game session, changing how they respond to the next one. This transformation of one session into paratext for the next is a product of the wiki’s role as a collaborative, persistent social memory that helps carry the storyworld forward.

Harviainen layers (storyworld/diegetic; in-character, ludic and social) give a perspective on this. In my review of wikis, I observed that the social layer is very much reduced or absent. Out of character conversations and interaction, which are an integral part of a group coming together to play, are not recorded. Instead, the focus is on the characters and game events.

Events on the ludic layer are partially recorded. Wikis often have foundational material, such as house rules and character generation guides. They also contain the statistics of key player and non-player characters and the information needed to ‘save’ the game state between sessions, such as character injuries and experience points. Much rarer was any record of the ludic minutia of the game. For example, the wiki might mention a character falling and injuring themselves as well as notes on the injury on their character sheet, but there is no account of the series of unlucky dice rolls or rule mechanics that led to the character falling.

By stripping away social elements and minimising ludic information, the account of gameplay is reduced to the central elements of the story. In writing these accounts, players and GMs re-contextualise and remediate their experiences into the wikis’ framework. What gets carried forward to the next session is an idealised version of events shaped by that framework. Wikis with a high level of fidelity to play—such as Blood and Bourbon (False_Epiphany et al.) which uses chat logs as the basis for its adventure record—show this clearly.

Blood and Bourbon signposts accounts that have the best writing and most interesting stories to signify what is desirable to emulate. In this manner, the wiki works as a paratext to shape the linkage between one session and the next, conserving the story and its events in a way that allows the players to shape their return to the in-character experience of the setting.

This is an expression of the social layer in that it reflects the ‘out of play’ opinions of the artistic quality of the work, but it is still a highly edited and restricted expression of this interaction as it does not outline the mechanism by which those views were reached or how they relate to the individual opinions of players and the GM. Instead, it is a corporate opinion of the group. This collective opinion creates a standard by which later play texts are judged. The standard then goes on to influence both how sessions are played and how they are recorded, contributing to the wiki’s role as framing paratext for play.

Conclusion

One of the great attractions of TRPGs is the freedom of players to redefine their experience and exercise agency over the game’s storyworld as a form of cyber-textual reading. Wikis are a method to create a paratext to influence that reading. The wikis act in this fashion as a practical tool to decide how and what information is passed from session to session. This includes the removal of extraneous events from the collective record through the remediation of the events of gameplay into narrative or diegetic accounts. Wikis also use aesthetic elements such as art and style choices that inspire and inform how a wiki reader’s imagination engages with the game world. Together these elements frame the play experience without being directly part of it. Wikis are a purposefully created and recreated paratext that reflect the value and intent of the players as the writers and readers of the gametext.

While it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is easy to see how this form of wiki creation extends beyond a play aid into a kind of digital literary mini-game set in the campaign’s context. After play has ended, the wiki stands as a literary artefact conserving the storyworld it helps shape.

Bibliography

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997.

Arnaud et al. “Alien Lost in the dark” Obsidian Portal 27 feb 2023. alienlostinthedark.obsidianportal.com/

Balsera, Leonard, et al. Dresden Files RPG: Your Story. Vol. 1, Evil Hat Productions Llc, 2010.

False_Epiphany, et al. “Blood & Bourbon.” Obsidian Portal,  27 Feb.   2023, blood-and-bourbon.obsidianportal.com/.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.

Hammer, Jessica. “Agency and Authority in Role-Playing Texts.” A New Literacies Sampler, by Colin Lankshear et al., Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 2007, pp. 67–93.

Harviainen, J. Tuomas. “A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis.” International Journal of Role-playing, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, ijrp.subcultures.nl/. Accessed 2023.

Jara, David, and Evan Torner. “Literary Studies in Role-Playing Games.” Role-Playing Game Studies A Transmedia Approach, by Jose P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, New York, 2018, p. 266.

Jara, David. “A Closer Look at the (Rule-) Books: Framings and Paratexts in Tabletop Role-Playing Games.” International Journal of Role-playing, vol. 1, no. 4, 2021, ijrp.subcultures.nl/. Accessed 2023.

Keryth987, et al. “Shadows over New York.” Obsidian Portal, 16 Jan. 2023, shadows-over-new-york.obsidianportal.com/.

Ketherian, et al. “Signs and Portents.” Obsidian Portal, 25 Jan. 2023, swtwc.obsidianportal.com/.

Macgregor, Jody. “This D&D Campaign Has Been Running for 40 Years.” Pcgamer, PC Gamer, 1 May 2022, www.pcgamer.com/this-dandd-campaign-has-been-running-for-40-years/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.

Nicholsvictoria2. “The Coldfall Sanction.” Obsidian Portal, 28 Dec. 2022, thecoldfallsanction.obsidianportal.com/

Spencer, Priscilla, and Jim Butcher. “Dresden Files: Jim Butcher.” Jim Butcher | The Online Site For Everything Jim, 9 July 2020, www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden.