Character Make

My first encounter with the culture known as TRPG came about thanks to my older cousin's persuasive efforts.

Honestly, at the time I had no choice in the matter.

Lyng around like a corpse in a fanless apartment in the middle of summer VS eating fried chicken at my cousin's place with the AC blasting full tilt—obviously you pick the latter.

My brain was still soft and squishy, too green to recognize the malice of the world, so I fell hook, line, and sinker for the suspiciously warm hospitality of my cousin and his friends—predators on the hunt for fresh newbies—and stumbled into this hopelessly niche hobby, whereupon I received endless suffering ever after.

Was TRPG not fun, you ask? No, that's not it. To be frank, I'd proudly rank it near the top even by modern standards, where every kind of entertainment overflows from every corner. For starters, the freedom and immersion are absolutely staggering, given that you personally decide your character's every action and line of dialogue.

But in a way, that's exactly what makes it so insidious—it's fun.

The best analogy I can offer is being a fan of a sports team perpetually stuck in the bottom of the standings. The dopamine when you finally claw out a victory is off the charts, but winning is just so damn hard.

TRPG is the same. The catharsis at its peak is incredible, but reaching that peak is like plucking a star from the sky.

First of all, gathering people is hard.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

It's a niche genre, and it eats up a serious amount of time, so coordinating schedules is a nightmare in itself.

And even if you somehow manage to assemble a group, there is no law of the universe that says a villain won't emerge from within it.

Ghosting everyone after firmly agreeing to show up. Ignoring the other player characters and monologuing about whatever they feel like. Tossing the rules aside to nitpick lore details. Going "GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL!!," ramming headlong into everything, then throwing a tantrum the moment their own character dies. And so on, and so forth. Every imaginable breed of troublemaker crawls out of the woodwork.

If the game were simply no fun, I'd have quit and found another hobby. But no—it's fun, it's just that actually tasting that fun to the very end is nearly impossible, so you're eternally stuck in a half-satisfied state of forced suffering. There is no evil quite like this evil.

Playing with vetted acquaintances does improve things somewhat, but unfortunately, every single person around me only ever wants to be a player, and keeps trying to shove the Game Master role onto me.

Being the GM has its own pleasures, sure, but even those grow stale with repetition. I want to be a player too, damn it.

So in the end, I turned to the internet.

Instead of gathering people offline, I tried playing remotely online. Which, as I later learned, was actually where the mainstream was headed all along.

Of course, this being a human endeavor, it wasn't free of incidents either, but after a few rounds of trial and error, I finally achieved results.

I succeeded in finding a GM-sent-from-heaven—generous with her time, skilled, and pleasant to boot—the kind rumored to be harder to find than a unicorn.

Twice every weekend. A session run over the course of about a month.

I beheaded the wizard who had spread a wicked necrotic plague in an attempt to turn the kingdom into a nation of zombies, gracefully pawned the credit for that feat off onto someone else, extorted the tidy fortune for myself, and rode off into the sunset to live in idle luxury. Once that ending rolled, I sat there drowning in the lingering afterglow.

Meanwhile, a message popped up in the chat window from the GM.

I let out a wry laugh.

"Well, fair enough. Separate from her sweet-as-honey speech patterns, she does tend to set the difficulty pretty brutal."

It wouldn't be strange at all for most players to rage-quit over it.

But I was the type to savor that kind of difficulty.

Part of it was that I was a seasoned veteran—though compared to pure fossils like my cousin and his crew, I'm practically spring water—but more than that, it was something more fundamental.

If all you want is to click a button and clear the screen, play an idle game. Why bother with TRPG?

I have no intention of telling other people how to enjoy their hobbies, but that's not my taste. Difficulty is what makes achievement feel like achievement.

"Oh ho?"

My eyes lit up and I typed back fast.

Why does a TRPG session need recommendations?

Had anyone else said that, I'd have dismissed it as empty bravado.

But the devotion and lavish preparation my GM had shown across every session so far were more than enough to plant serious anticipation and trust in me.

Still, one thing puzzled me.

"This person really is insane about TRPG. Maybe she's loaded?"

TRPG is a fairly expensive hobby—not so much in money as in time and stamina.

It devours vast quantities of both, which ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠means it's not exactly well suited to a corporate worker grinding away on a razor-thin margin.

Take me, for instance: I scrape together generous hours on the weekends by working weekdays to the point where I do little more than sleep after clocking out.

It would be a lie to say I didn't want to.

But I was also, undeniably, a working adult.

There was no way I could just jump feet-first into a session whose schedule I didn't even know—

I answered instantly.

Why on earth would I hesitate over this?

And then came the appointed day.

"...Is this really the right building?"

I checked the address from the message against the structure in front of me, again and again.

It wasn't some haunted mansion with a ghost liable to pop out at any second, nor a crumbling heap of ruins.

If it had been, I wouldn't have even paused to think. I'd have simply turned tail and bolted.

No—what threw me was that it was a spectacularly luxurious high-rise that looked like it'd clear thirty floors without breaking a sweat.

I searched the company name on my phone.

Dynamic Interactive Campaign Experience.

Translated literally: "dynamic interactive campaign experience."

Loosely rendered, it meant something like "an immersive campaign completed together with the consumer."

Shortened: D.I.C.E. Corp.

A board game company? Or maybe one of those escape-room cafés run as a chain?

Judging by the scale of the building, it seemed like a fairly sizable operation, yet there was barely any record of their actual business activities to be found.

A faint, faint unease stirred in my gut—but it didn't last long.

This was a company sitting dead center in the heart of downtown, in the most conspicuous spot imaginable. What could possibly go wrong?

"Ah, Zeras! Welcome!"

At the sudden voice, I turned my head.

There stood a strikingly beautiful woman in a polished, tailored suit, smiling at me.

I ventured a careful reply.

"...GM?"

"Please, call me Shatia. I'm not the GM in this session, you see."

Well—I mean, over a chat screen it's one thing, but going around in real life calling someone "Shatia" felt a bit... actually, never mind. I'd be calling everyone by their character names and handles for the duration of the session anyway.

"Now, this way please. Another player is already waiting for us."

I followed behind her as she briskly led the way, feeling vaguely dazed.

Shatia guided me to a certain office on the sixth floor, where—whether as someone's practical joke or the company's own idea of humor—the nameplate read a large, bold 6, followed by two additional 6s no bigger than a thumbnail.

When I pointed that out half-jokingly, Shatia, for some reason, smiled all the more deeply.

"What a sharp eye. Inviting you was well worth the effort, Zeras."

"Oh no, it was nothing. Anyone would notice."

Stepping inside the office, I found a woman who appeared to be the earlier arrival.

But her fashion sense was, how should I put it...

...Cosplay?

Blonde twintails—and not just any twintails, but the kind where both bundled ends spilled all the way down past her waist.

Her top was off-the-shoulder, cut to bare a generous stretch of cleavage. Her bottoms were technically pants, but with slits running up the sides held together by crisscrossed laces like an X—exposure levels considerable here, there, and everywhere.

By any measure, it was a wildly inappropriate outfit for walking the streets of South Korea, yet the woman showed not the slightest trace of shrinking back. She carried herself with pure, unshakeable confidence.

Which, admittedly, was easy enough to manage when you had the looks and figure to back it up.

"Ah! Shatia unnie!! Why are you so late?! I was bored to death waiting!"

"Haha, I'm sorry. Now, this is Zeras. I mentioned him before, remember?"

"Hi there! I'm Lueru! So how old are you? You're older than me, right? Thirty?"

"...I'm twenty-five."

"Whoa, you've got old man eyes! I'm a fresh-faced twenty! Nice to meet you, ahjussi!"

"Why does a five-year gap make me an ahjussi?"

"The difference between an oppa and an ahjussi is whether he demands logical justification when someone calls him ahjussi!"

"......"

Barely thirty seconds into the conversation, and I could feel the life draining out of me.

More importantly—this girl plays TRPG? Is this some kind of scam?

Feeling an inexplicable sense of injustice, I took my seat, and Shatia opened her mouth with a smile.

"The main game itself will be run by the others, but I'll personally assist you up through Character Make. Shall we begin?"