Breaking Fourth Walls and Magic Circles

This is the second essay in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This essay is about fourth walls and magic circles. I wrote it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Spoiler Warning: This essay describes the ending of Tully State Forest by Ravensridge Press.In theatre, the fourth wall is the invisible barrier between the performers on stage and the audience of the play. When a character breaks the fourth wall, they typically speak directly to the audience, briefly raising awareness of the fiction or dispelling the fiction entirely. A good example is at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck asks the audience for their applause or at the end of The Tempest when Prospero does the same. In these final scenes, the wall comes down and the magic circle breaks.As a term derived from western theatre’s spatial layout, the “fourth wall” does not apply to tabletop RPGs, in which the space between performer and audience…