Process drama highlights the shift from performance as product to performance as a co-created process of inquiry and discovery. Cecily O’Neill (1995) describes its purpose as the establishment of an imagined world – a dramatic elsewhere – that is collectively generated, inhabited, and sustained by participants. This mirrors the central concern of serious ttrpg play: the shared construction of fictional frames through which participants can explore real questions of meaning, power, and possibility.
Within this dramatic elsewhere, participants develop understanding through the same interpretive strategies they use in everyday life—reading body language, interpreting tone, navigating emotions, tracing subtexts, negotiating intentions, and making choices that reveal values and consequences. For process drama, this is a carefully faciliated and girded process where imagination and embodied practice allow people to test and reflect on patterns of meaning that also operate in their lived social worlds.
The inward-facing value of play.
Process drama is not performed for an external audience; the value lies in the participants’ shared experience. Likewise, TTRPG design can emphasise play as a meaningful end in itself, resisting pressures to produce a polished “story” or “arc.” This invites mechanics that reward discovery, exploration, and personal resonance rather than narrative closure.
The role of the facilitator as guide.
In process drama, the teacher shapes conditions for exploration rather than directing outcomes. For TTRPGs, this reinforces the idea of the gamemaster as facilitator of co-creation rather than sole author. Design can support this by distributing narrative authority—through player-driven scene framing, token economies, or prompt-based storytelling.
Radical tolerance as design ethic.
Process drama frames participation as a practice of radical tolerance (Mayerfeld Bell & Gardiner, 1998): not merely allowing difference, but cultivating mutual recognition. TTRPGs can embed this principle through mechanics of listening and recognition (e.g., structured “paint the scene” prompts, safety tools, or consent frameworks), ensuring that divergent perspectives enrich rather than fracture play.
Taken together, these lessons suggest that TTRPGs, like process drama, can be understood as safe spaces for experiments of imagination. Their design and facilitation should aim less at generating polished stories and more at fostering shared inquiry, empathy, and social understanding through the medium of play.
The House of Nerdery and Curios 