playing roles

You could never win in that game. What would that even mean? It was a hard world, a dungeon world, and though the guy running the game was supposed to be able to overrule the dice, I never saw it happen. All you could do was make your choices and role the dice, and see what happened. You might get cursed or poisoned or fall off a cliff or devoured by an ankheg, you might see a waterfall the size of a planet or get lost in a cave full of ghosts. You might find a glittering treasure or lose one.

You only ever really had control over one thing: sometimes, if you tried hard to figure out where he was going with all this, and you played along, you could have a hero's journey. If you did it right, the whole thing turned into a story worth telling. All of the poison and jewels and traps and thieves and palaces, if you made it into a real story, it would mean something. Those occasional glimpses of meaning were the only kind of experience points that mattered, after the game was over.