This Be the Place: A Gaming Table in Philadelphia

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

The table in the living room of my friend’s rowhouse in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia is usually stowed away under the couch. Tonight, it is set up in the middle of the room, holding assorted dice, maps, sheets of paper with character skills and attributes, and a spread of food. This is our weekly session of Dungeons & Dragons, and my friends and I have been competing to bring the most disgusting snacks we can find. I sample a “Guinness and chili”-flavored potato chip, the taste of which I can best describe as “wet dog in the corner of an Irish pub.”

The table is wooden and rectangular, with leaves on each end that slide out so all six of us can fit around it. It’s old, though its exact age is undetermined. It was left behind in a house that my friend’s neighbor, a real estate agent, was selling. My friend took it off his neighbor’s hands and sawed down the unusually long legs to make it a table fit for playing games.

Over the years, the table has been transformed into many places: a giant’s flying castle, soaring high above nations at war; the deck of a weatherbeaten barge, under attack by a monstrous kraken; the ancient temple of an evil deity resurrected by her cult. It has been turned into places mundane and profound, bewitching and bedeviling.

I’ve been many characters at this table and ones like it: a poet (before I could imagine being one in real life, though I desperately wanted to be); a wizard being slowly corrupted by an evil grimoire; a mercenary working to take care of her widowed sister and niece. Tonight, I am a talking badger.

In his classic How to Do Things with Words, the analytic philosopher J.L. Austin points to “performative utterances”—language that doesn’t just describe the world but actually changes it. For example, when two people getting married each say “I do,” they are changed. Those words spoken are the method by which the couple goes from unmarried to married. But the words don’t work on their own—without the right conditions (in this case the officiant, the witnesses, the license), they’re just words.

At the gaming table, language becomes performance. When, while playing, I say my talking badger tries to climb the walls of the castle, that is what happens—in the world of the game. But certain conditions must be met: only when we’re together, inhabiting the space of the game, do our words create a world.

I’ve been playing role-playing games at tables like this one for decades, though calling them games has always felt off to me, because there is no winning or losing—the objective is to tell a story improvisationally and, most importantly, collaboratively.

At this table, there is no script; the story isn’t written beforehand. No one knows exactly what will happen next; we each become performer and audience, rolled into one. We have conversations, we joke, we try to set each other up for moments where our characters can shine. It doesn’t always work; we’re not professional actors. But when it does, I feel the same way I do when I’ve made a sweet pass in a pickup basketball game or baked a cake that my dinner guests raved about or figured out how to fix that broken toilet handle.

At the end of the session, I help clean up. Dice, papers, and pencils are packed away. Dishes are cleared and maps are rolled up. The gaming table isn’t a regular piece of living room furniture here; it comes out for the evening and is stowed away after. My friends flip the table upside down and I unscrew the bolts that secure the legs. Together, we slide the tabletop and legs under the couch, where they slip out of sight. The living room is simply a living room again. Until our next adventure.