What makes collaborative storycraft, process drama, and serious tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) distinctive is that they are artforms created in the moment, by those present, for those present. They resist the dominant logic of art as product, as something fixed, polished, and presented to an audience. Instead, their value lies in the lived, ephemeral experience of co-creation.
In process drama, Cecily O’Neill (1995) describes the aim as building a dramatic elsewhere—an imagined world sustained through improvised role-play. Here, participants are not actors in rehearsal for a future performance, but collaborators engaged in inquiry, using the interpretive strategies of everyday life: reading gestures, discerning subtexts, making choices, and reflecting on consequences. No outside audience is necessary; the meaning is generated within the group.
Serious TTRPGs share this ethos. While popular discourse often frames role-playing games as engines for producing stories, their deeper significance lies in the act of play itself. At the table, participants construct worlds, characters, and relationships together. Rules, dice, and prompts shape the flow of interaction, but the story emerges only in and through play. There is no definitive version of events beyond the shared memory of participants; what matters is not narrative polish but discovery, exploration, and personal resonance.
Collaborative storycraft provides a language that bridges these traditions. It highlights how meaning is created through dialogue, improvisation, and mutual recognition. The facilitator—whether teacher, gamemaster, or guide—curates conditions for co-creation rather than controlling outcomes. The art lies not in the finished story but in the process of storytelling as social inquiry, where imagination becomes a way to rehearse new possibilities for living and understanding together.
This orientation distinguishes these practices from most other artforms. A play, novel, or film is designed to endure and circulate beyond its creators. Process drama, collaborative storycraft, and serious TTRPGs are intensely present-tense arts: they exist only in the moment of enactment, sustained by trust and collective attention. What they leave behind is not an artefact, but a transformation in participants’ ways of seeing themselves, others, and the worlds they imagine together.
In this sense, they invite us to reconsider what counts as art. Not all art needs to be observed, preserved, or consumed. Some of the most profound forms are those that vanish as soon as they are made, leaving only the deepened bonds, insights, and resonances of a story co-created at the table.
The House of Nerdery and Curios 