Never played one?
A tabletop role-playing game is a story a group makes up together, out loud, with rules to keep it honest. There is no screen and no board. Someone describes a place; you say what your character does; the group finds out what happens. The pictures are all in your head, which is why the good ones stay with you longer than any game with graphics.
Four pieces do all the work.
the world
A place with its own facts
A holding on a river, a keep in the woods, a city. It has weather, rooms, people who live there, things that are simply true whether or not you like them. You didn't invent it and you can't wish it different.
the storyteller
Whoever describes it to you
Traditionally one person — the Game Master, or GM. They describe what you see, speak for everyone you meet, and say what the world does back. It is the hardest seat at the table and the reason most games never get started.
your character
The person you play as
A name, a history, some things you're good at, some you're not. Traditionally written on a sheet of paper. You decide what they try; the world decides how it goes.
the dice
The part nobody controls
When something is genuinely uncertain and failing would cost you, you roll. The dice stop the story being whatever the loudest person wants — including the storyteller.
"Rolling for it" — when, and why
You don't roll for everything. If you're strong and the door isn't barred, you open the door — that's not a moment, it's just a thing you did. In Onen the rule is put plainly: a simple act simply succeeds, and if you're unsure whether something needs a roll, it doesn't. Dice come out only when the outcome is really in doubt and failing would take something from you.
When they do come out, they don't just say pass or fail. Onen's own dice system — called NOMAD — rolls one lucky die against one unlucky one and takes the difference, and a top result rolls again and adds, so no outcome is ever entirely off the table. The result lands in a band: overwhelming, clear, marginal, a dead stalemate where nothing moves, or one of three grades of trouble. Anything short of clean success has to bite — a real, named consequence, an option closed or a threat opened, never just a change of mood.
Where the roll lands also says whose doing it was. A low roll points at the world — a draught, a slick floor, someone watching. A middling one points at other people — who helped, who baulked. A high one points squarely at you, your brilliance or your blunder. The storyteller reads that into what happens.
That's the whole craft. Everything below is about who holds the storyteller's seat.
What the LLM changes
The GM is the bottleneck in every tabletop game ever played. They have to be free when you're free, hold the whole world in their head, voice everyone you meet, and adjudicate fairly while being just as invested as you are. Groups don't fold because people stop enjoying it. They fold because Tuesday stopped working for Sam.
Put an LLM in that seat and four things change — and only the last one is really new.
Nobody waits for anybody
The obvious one first. The storyteller is available at 6am and at midnight, for ten minutes or for three hours. But the deeper fix isn't availability — it's that the game stops assuming everyone is present at the same resolution.
Characters whose players are away don't freeze mid-sentence and they don't get puppeted. They're still real and still around — about the town, by the fire of an evening — just not at the table right now. If you say something to one of them, that lands as a fact at their scale: you sought them out, you put your question. It gets answered when they next turn up. The scene doesn't wait on them, and it owes them no pause. Come back tomorrow and the answer is there.
The world keeps its own record
Everything committed — what was done, what was said, who was there — is written down where the group can read it, not held in one person's memory or one person's notebook. Pick the game up a week later and nothing has been lost or quietly re-remembered. It also means play can run at whatever rhythm suits you: minute to minute, or a few beats a day, or an evening a fortnight.
The dice are fixed before anyone looks
An LLM in the storyteller's seat could, in principle, fudge anything. So it isn't given the dice to choose. Each actor's luck is settled from the moment itself, before the storyteller reads it, independently for each person involved — and a settled result is never re-rolled. The storyteller's job is to read what the dice already say and narrate it truly. It cannot rescue you and it cannot pick on you.
And the real one: everyone gets their own honest view
At a normal table, one person describes the room and five people hear the same words. That's not because it's right — it's because a human can only say it once. It's the compromise every tabletop game has quietly lived with forever.
Here, when something happens, one terse public account of it is committed — what actually occurred, who did what. Then each player is told the moment from where their character was standing, in their own words, with their own private reads of it kept to themselves. Same event; different truth for each of you, all of them honest.
Which sounds like a flourish until you see what falls out of it:
- You don't know a name until you've heard it. Someone introduces themselves in front of you, and from that moment they have a name and everyone present may use it. Until then they're the broad-shouldered man, the quick-eyed woman. Names are earned in the fiction, not handed out on a roster.
- Nobody narrates your insides. Another player's character can be observed, never explained. What they felt or meant reaches you as your reading of them, uncertainty and all — you read the stillness as a door closing; you may be wrong.
- Silence stays silent. If someone hasn't answered you yet, you're told plainly that they haven't. No "she seems to be weighing it" — because that would promise you something that doesn't exist yet.
- Words survive whole. What a character actually said is kept verbatim, not summarised into "asks her whether she'd heard of them" — which would rob you of words you were never given.
This is the thing a human GM cannot do, not for want of skill but for want of hours: describe the same room five different ways, five times, every time, honestly. It's also what lets a single world hold far more people than one table ever could — because everyone is only ever dealing with whoever and whatever is actually near them. There's no moment where the whole world has to be in one place.
The four ways to be at the table
You don't have to be a player or a GM. There are four seats, and you can move between them — most people start in the first and stay there.
character
You're in it
You are one person in the world, and you see what that person could see — no more. This is where almost everyone plays, and no other seat is needed to have a whole evening.
the default
author
You make the place
You write the world — its rooms and roads, who lives there, what's true about it. A single scenario, a campaign, or somewhere you keep adding to for years. Done as its own deliberate act, before anyone sits down to play, not improvised mid-scene.
before the game
designer
You change the rules
How dice work, how outcomes are read, how hard things are. NOMAD is what comes in the box — swap it for a system you already love, or write your own. The engine underneath doesn't care which.
rarely, deliberately
observer
You watch
Read a scene, follow a character, review a game afterwards, write it up. You can't change anything — and yet you're not doing nothing: a room with someone watching stays alive, and an unwatched one goes quiet, which is exactly as it should be.
and others can watch you
The seat you're in decides what you're shown as much as what you can do. What reaches you as a Character is built from what your character could actually know — your own account of things, the public record, the place you're standing in — never from a view of the whole world. Your private notes on a scene are locked to you, and nobody else can act as your character. Making the seats themselves airtight at the foundations is still being firmed up; today the discipline is in how the game is run.
What a turn actually feels like
Less ceremony than you'd expect. Each turn, in order:
You're told where you are and what's happened since you last looked — the place, the light, who's present, what they did and said — written to you, in the present tense, ending with an invitation to say what you do. Nothing is invented to fill space; if the room is quiet, the room is quiet.
Then you act. A deed is committed briefly and publicly — the plain fact of what you did. Speech is committed as the words themselves. If you'd like, you can float an intention first, visible to the others in the room, revisable, withdrawable — a way of saying I'm thinking of doing this before you're bound to it. That part isn't the act. Until you commit, your move isn't real, and once you commit, it's yours and nobody rewrites it.
That's it. Most turns never touch the dice.
Start playing
Two doors. The first works end to end today; the second is where it's going.
- Pick a name to play under. One word is fine — tamsin, brannoc, hesper. It becomes your character's name in the world and how the world knows you came back.
-
Door one — your own Claude (or any LLM app that takes connectors). Add this connector, once:
https://bsp.hermitcrab.me/mcp/v1
That's the whole setup. Nothing to install, no account to make. -
Say this. Replace the name with yours:
Take me into thornwood as tamsin. I've never played a tabletop RPG before — walk me in from the gate, and set the scene.
Thornwood is a standing world with an inn in it, the Beaten Drum, where people have actually played. - What happens next. A name the world hasn't met is taken to the gate first — an out-of-character lobby where you can see who else is standing about and sort out who's playing what. Then you make your character, and then you arrive. From there it's just perceive, act, commit, over and over, for as long as you feel like.
- Door two — xstream, in a browser. xstream.onen.ai is the live surface over the same world, where you can see other people mid-thought rather than waiting turns. Bring your own API key. Fair warning: the game setup there is still being finalised, so today it's the better door for real-time presence and the rougher one for a full session.
- Playing with friends? One of you sets up a table first — a private copy of a scenario, made once, before anyone sits down — and hands round its web address. Everyone then walks in through that address with their own character name, and what happens at your table touches nobody else's. When you're done, you just abandon it; replaying is a new table, not a reset. Brackenfoot is the scenario currently kept ready to copy: a hard, grounded holding, with a roster of roles you can adopt or set aside.
A note on tempo: through an LLM app, play runs at roughly play-by-post pace — you act, it resolves, the result is there on your next read. Conversation between two players takes turns, because each side has to read the other before replying. Talking to the people the world provides is immediate. Fast, live, everyone-at-once scenes are what xstream is for.
Where it's really at
honest state · july 2026
This has been played live, by real people, and it works — a table ran at Thornwood, and scenes happened at the Beaten Drum. It is not a product. The rules still describe themselves as a first version. The browser door is mid-build. Some of what you meet will be rough, and some of it will be the game telling you something surprising because a rule you didn't know about was doing its job.
The standard set for this work is not "we built it" but deployed and experienced — and by that standard the RPG isn't finished. If you'd rather wait for polish, wait. If you'd like to be one of the first people through a world that's genuinely open, this is the moment for it.
One more thing worth knowing up front: it's all public. What you commit — what your character did and said — anyone can read. Your private reads of a scene stay yours, and only you can write as your character, but there's no walled garden here. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
Under the hood
The one section with the machinery showing. Skip it freely — you don't need any of this to play.
There is no game engine. The substrate is the game state: reading the world is reading blocks, and acting in the world is writing blocks. Your character is a passport block whose secret you hold, which is why nobody can act as you. World canon is a sedimentary sed: collective — the first to declare a fact holds that position permanently, and later entries extend rather than overwrite. Scenes are frame blocks and rooms are pools, with pending intentions and committed record as separate layers. Contested actions gather into a window and resolve through a grit pool, claimed atomically so exactly one resolution lands. Oaths and debts between characters are grain: blocks, private to the two of them. And the four faces — Character, Author, Designer, Observer — compose with an aperture tier to say what a given reader should be shown. That pair rides as an advisory modifier, not a gate: the beach is public by design, so a player's view is composed to their face rather than withheld by the substrate. What stops anyone acting as you is the lock on your own passport, not a refused read.
Which is the actual claim worth testing: nothing about the RPG is bespoke. The same coordination primitives that carry autonomous agents and real-world collaboration carry a multiplayer narrative game, unchanged. The game is a use-case, not a build.