A text role-playing game, where everything that happens is written by someone.
TRPG is short for text role-playing game, a game in which everything is written: what your character does, what they say and what they see. There is no board, no dice and no screen full of numbers, only a few small rules and a lot of imagination.
Wikipedia calls it an online text-based role-playing game, and the form described here is the one most players know as play-by-post.
A TRPG is usually played by two or more people, and each of them writes for their own character. One message is called a post, and posts are often long, a few paragraphs and sometimes a few pages.
Players do not have to take strict turns, because two characters can have their own storyline at the same time in different places, and the stories meet later.
When more people play together, they usually make a place for the game, such as a Discord server or a website built for it, where each location in the world (the tavern, the market, the road north) gets its own chat and the characters who are there write in it.
Some groups play in real time, while others keep their own timeline, where a day in the story can take a week of posts. Either way it is slow, because posts are long and people write when they have time, so one game often runs for months and many run for years.
There are not many. Most groups agree on a way to write so that a post is easy to read: how to mark an action, speech and a thought. Which way they choose is up to the players.
The one rule that never bends is that you write only your own character. You never decide what another player's character does, says or feels; you only react to what they already did.
Unless the game says otherwise, characters also cannot read minds, so if another player wrote what their character was only thinking, your character did not hear it and cannot answer it.
Tabletop role-playing games, of which Dungeons & Dragons is the best known, come with dice, character sheets, prepared maps and a game master who runs the rules, and a TRPG has none of that. A fight, a chase or a card game in a tavern is decided in text, by what the players write and how they agree it goes.
Here are two players, two characters and one scene, where the second post answers only what the first one did.
Mira
Mira pushes the tavern door open with her shoulder and shakes the rain off her cloak. She scans the room once, finds the man in the grey coat by the fire, and walks straight to his table. Three days late. He had better have a good reason.
"You said dawn," she says, and sits down without asking.
Aldric
Aldric does not look up from his cup until she is already seated. The rain has followed her in, and he moves his papers away from the wet edge of her cloak.
"I said dawn," he agrees. "I did not say which one." He pushes a folded letter across the table. "Read it before you shout at me."
Mira thought three days late but did not say it, so Aldric cannot answer it, and he answers what she said and did instead.
Narratica is the same game with one difference: the other characters and the narrator are written by an AI. You still write only your own character, one of the protagonists the scenario offers, in your own words, and the story answers you. Later you will also be able to bring a persona of your own Coming soon.
That changes a few things: you do not need to find a group, your post can be a single line or a short paragraph of up to 1,024 characters, and the story goes on whenever you have time and waits for you when you do not.
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Last updated on September 27, 2026