Baldur's Gate 3's narrator wants to play TTRPGs like D&D forever: 'when we're old ladies, right? In the old people's home … we're gonna freak the f*ck out of a bunch of carers'

pcgamer.com:

I chatted to Amelia Tyler earlier this week. In case you're unfamiliar, Tyler's the voice of Baldur's Gate 3's narrator, but she's also a huge nerd and a seasoned roleplayer. While we talked about her favourite voice lines—as well as playing the Dark Urge's inner monologue—the conversation inevitably shifted towards pen & paper.

We got to talking about how roleplaying—the act of make-believe and inhabiting a character, whether in a video game or a TTRPG—involves breaking off a little piece of yourself and experimenting with it. «It's amazing,» Tyler agrees. «And that's kind of what I love about the tabletop version as well, because you have a bunch of people doing that simultaneously. And you end up with interactions you could never have predicted … it's so juicy and psychologically interesting.»

That bit—«psychologically interesting»—twigs a memory on my end. A few times Matthew Mercer, the DM of the mega-popular D&D livestream Critical Role, has talked about a book called Me, Myself, and Why. Jennifer Ouellette, the book's author, suggests that the memories we record about our TTRPG exploits («I rolled a natural 20 and killed that dragon!» or «I couldn't save that NPC we really liked in time») get put in the same area of our brains as actual, real-life memories.

Not only does Tyler agree with that theory, she has a plan to capitalise on it: «Some of my friends and I were like, so when we're old ladies, right? In the old people's home, we're gonna forget that this wasn't real—there's a group of us who've been playing A Song of Ice and Fire [a Game of Thrones TTRPG] for many, many seasons.

»When we get old, we're going to forget that we didn't take over the country and start a coup and murder a bunch of people at a