🎤 Thomas Manuel on Theatre and RPGs

This is the first interview in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. I conducted it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.In online communities for tabletop RPGs, Thomas Manuel is a well-known journalist and RPG critic who hosts the Yes Indie’d podcast, curates the Indie RPG newsletter, and writes for Rascal News. Thomas is also an award-winning playwright. His play Hamlet and Angad (2016) won the Hindu Playwright Award, and it is published alongside two of his other plays The Uprising and A Play About Death in a single volume by Dhauli Books.I asked to interview Thomas because I think tabletop RPGs and theater have an affinity with one another that he can speak to uniquely, and because I wanted to consider the formal distinctions between these two media to introduce design considerations for this series. The result is a discussion in which Thomas probes easy generalizations about theatre, considers for whom these…