1 Running head: INSIDER LOOK: ROLL 20 VIRTUAL TABLETOP

Insider Look: Roll 20 Virtual Tabletop

Marisol Montes
University of Texas at El Paso
English 1311
July 25, 2014
Paul LaPrade

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Abstract
A discourse community can be defined by John Swaless six defining characteristics of what a
discourse community is. It can be determined that Roll 20 Virtual Tabletop is a valid discourse
community and is offers its members the opportunities to learn a lot more than whats expected.
This community has services available to its users that if used they can prove to be very useful in
situations outside of the community. The skills that are learned are fundamental and are very
valuable skills to know such as decision-making and teamwork skills. The community makes it
very convenient for online role-players to participate in campaigns and get information out of the
communitys forums and blogs. Its a great community to be a part of and anyone who chooses
to take part in it will get more out of it than just a chance to fantasy role-play.


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In our society there are hundreds of communities that are formed through a collective
desire in a few people to express their interests, knowledge, and concerns with each other and
anybody else interested in the particular subject. These communities are called discourse
communities. An example of an online discourse community is a community called Roll 20
Virtual Tabletop. For those that dont know what a tabletop is, it is referring to tabletop gaming
or otherwise known as role-playing. There are different ways of role-playing but the one that is
the practiced on this website is pen and paper role-playing where the participants use character
sheets to create fantasy characters that they control in a world that is controlled by the Game
Master. This community offers the participants the ability to utilize the skills they have learned
while role-playing in their daily lives. Some of these skills include strategic decision-making,
thinking logically, in most cases teamwork skills, and even some basic math skills.
The writing by John Swales is a very descriptive and thorough analysis of what a
discourse community is. Swales identifies a discourse community through a series of
characteristics that have to be present in every discourse community for it to be qualified as such.
These characteristics are referred to as the Swales Test and consist of 6 defining characteristics
which include (1) a set of common, public goals, (2) form of intercommunication within the
community, (3) mechanisms through which the community provides information, (4) genre, (5)
lexis, and (6) threshold level of members. He clarifies to the readers that a discourse community
is composed of people of a society that want to maintain and extend a groups knowledge.
(Swales, 1990. pp. 224).
James E. Porters reading focuses on the presence of intertextuality in everything that is
written. He writes about how intertextuality is not only present in everything but that it is
inevitable because in every idea that we build and write about we are being influence by other
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ideas and other peoples words. He writes that traces and bits (Porter, 1986. pp. 397) of other
peoples words and ideas can be found scattered within all texts. One of the best examples that
he gives to represent what intertextuality looks like is the example of Thomas Jefferson writing
The Declaration of Independence. He may have been the author but he was influenced by a lot of
other writings and sayings that were popular during the time. The presence of intertextuality is
also present in discourse community. Porter talks about how a text within a discourse community
must demonstrate (or at least claim) that is contributes knowledge to the field, (Porter, 1986.
pp. 401). Although Porter does not mention it this also includes the intertextuality in the other
forms of communication within a discourse community.
According to the Swales Test this community should follow all of the 6 characteristics
to be considered a discourse community. The first of the characteristics is the set of common,
public goals. Roll 20 Virtual Tabletops primary common, public goal is to offer the community
members an easy and convenient system for them to use to create campaigns and participate in
those campaigns. Another one of the communitys goals is make it very easy for its members to
find information within the website about GM-ing and role-playing.
The second characteristic of the Swales Test is the way through which the community
members communicate with other members among the community. In Roll 20 VT there are
group chats where people that are part of the same campaign can communicate. These group
chats not only allow the participants to communicate with the whole group but it also allows
members to whisper things to another campaign member with the complete secrecy of a real
whisper. Within the campaigns the players can also communicate through video. This system is
similar to Skype where several people can stream live videos of themselves and use that to talk
to each other and see who they are communicating with. It makes communication within the
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group of fantasy adventurers a much more intimate experience that unites friends or
acquaintances made through the community.
The third characteristic of the Swales Test is the mechanisms that are used to provide
information and feedback. In the website there is a blog through which people with knowledge to
share or inquires to make can write up posts that other people may see and comment on. There is
also the community forum where the most interesting topics about the websites content are
discussed among the people that are part of the community.
The following two characteristics of the Swales Test are the genre and lexis which help
identify the community as a unique community. The genre of Roll 20 VT is role-playing
tabletop. There are different types of role-playing but this particular form can be distinguished as
the pencil and paper role-playing because the participants write down all the statistics of the
characters they are playing on a character sheet. Something else that helps distinguish this as
tabletop role-playing is the use of dice to determine the actions of the characters. Although Roll
20 uses virtual dice and the character sheets are online, it would be easy for anybody who has
role-played before to understand that this is pencil and paper role-playing.
The Lexis of the discourse community is the distinct language or words that are used to
communicate among the members. In this role-playing community the terms include a lot of
abbreviations and acronyms such as STR, DEX, CON, A.C., B.A.B., and NAT 20, just to show
some examples; these are mostly related to the statistics of the fantasy character. For anyone who
is part of the community these abbreviations and acronyms along with many other like them are
part of the regular vocabulary.
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The last characteristic of the Swales Test is the threshold level of members with a
suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. (Swales, 1990. pp. 222) The
amount of people on the Roll 20 VT community cannot be exactly measured but by browsing
through the communitys forums and blogs it can be determined that the community has a
handful of active members from all around the country and the world. These members are
continuously sharing their expertise of the communitys content. Within campaigns the more
experienced members share their knowledge to help their fellow apprentice campaigners
progress through the story and finish as more than just beginners but as experienced community
members; they will later be able to pass along their knowledge to other newbies (new players).
My audience is anybody who is interested in online role-playing communities and people
who dont appreciate what role-playing has to offer to the people who participate in it. This
community has a lot to offer people that want to meet other people and use their imagination to
express themselves. This is also directed towards anybody who has role-played before using
Dungeons & Dragons and especially Pathfinder which is the main playing system for this
community. The community offers a lot of convenience to people who want to role-play with
friends that are out of town or have moved away.
People who participate in these role-playing campaigns through the Roll 20 VT
community learn to use skills such as strategic decision making, logical thinking, and teamwork
skill not only in the community but also in their daily lives. The unforgiving stereotypes for
people who role-play are that they are losers who never leave their house and probably spend a
lot of their lives in their mothers basements but the truth is that role-players can be very
outgoing people. Through the research conducted on this discourse community, it can be
assumed that that stereotype is almost non-existent and is quite the opposite instead. Members of
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the Roll 20 community have developed very basic but necessary skills that can help them learn
how to think critically in situations outside of the community. To some people strategy and logic
might not seem like very important things for humans to know but they are. Strategy and logic
are embedded into every task that we take on and whether a person knows how to use them or
not determines their ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently. There are also the team-
building skills that the community members learn while on quests. The members must work
together to successfully complete tasks by using their collective problem solving skills. It is
definitely a useful skill to know since we often have to work together with people in all sorts of
environments.
To help the reader understand what role-playing really offers to the people, the reader
must first understand that role-playing games emerged from these age-old practices, but also
from several cultural shifts inherent to American life in the latter half of the twentieth century.
(Bowman, 2010. pp.1) Bowman, the author of the book The Functions of Role-Playing, also
writes about the benefits of roleplaying as communal cohesiveness which in other terms could
be described as teamwork, complex problem-solving which ties along with strategic decision-
making, and also provides players a safe space to enact alternate personas. (Bowman, 2010.
pp.1) Although the last one is not something that was considered in this argument it is still a very
valuable function that role-playing offers. In another book Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine
the writer says about fantasy role-playing, because these games are not competitive contest,
the participants can acquire cooperative social skills, in addition to decision-making and topical
learning. (Fine, 1983. pp. 11). It is no doubt that this community offers its members the
opportunity to expand their knowledge outside of the games they take a part of.
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In another article, Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me How to Write by Laurel Jean, Jean
writes about how Dungeons and Dragons, another form of role-playing, taught him about the
relationships between teacher/student and how it parallels dungeon master/player. Like
Bowman, Jean also discusses another benefit to roleplaying that was not previously discussed in
this argument. Apart from the relationship building Jean emphasizes the distinct parallels
between D&D and composition instruction. (Jean, 2013. pp.5) This is a whole other argument
that was made but it does not fall short of highlighting the benefits of roleplaying.
This community offers the participants the chance to learn and use a lot of fundamental
skills but there are a few downsides to the community. This discourse community offers a lot of
convenience to the participants. Its information is easy to acquire and it is easy to learn how to
use the sources the community offers, especially if the user has role-played before, but it lacks
the closeness of roleplaying with people in the same room. Another downside is the high reliance
of a medium-fast working internet connection. Since this community is an online discourse
community there is no doubt that a functioning internet connection is necessary but to keep up
with all the movement of the role-playing there is a certain quality that is required. The constant
need to refresh the page can become a bit tiresome and annoying to players. These are merely
mild inconveniences compared to the great amount of knowledge of all forms that can be learned
through being a part of the community.
Researching the community Roll 20 Virtual Tabletop and making an argument about its
positive influence on its members revealed a lot more than I was expecting to find. While
reading through the resources that I found there were many good things about role-playing that I
had not considered in my previous argument. While I did not discuss them like I discussed the
other points in my argument I still considered them as valid benefits to what the community
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offers its members. In this community there is a high level of communication required.
Communication is an essential part of every discourse community and in this community
participation relies heavily on the ability to communicate effectively with the other members.
Roll 20 is a great community to be a part of if the person has any interest in role-playing and
building up fundamental skills such as strategic decision-making, teamwork skills, and
communication skills.
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Swales, John. (1990) The concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in
Academic and Research Settings. Writing About Writing: A College Reader. Boston: Cambridge
UP. 21-32. Print.
Porter, James E. (1986) Intertextuality and the Discourse Community. Rhetoric Review 5.1.
Writing About Writing: A College Reader. 34-47. Print.
Bowman, S. L. (2010) The Functions of Role-Playing Games. Retrieved from http://1-media-
cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/tg/image/1353/61/1353614088639.pdf
Fine, G. A. (1983) Shared Fantasy. Retrieved from
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rLlLbN0XuSEC&oi=fnd&pg=PP11&dq=shared
+fantasy&ots=Ayl6SWCSTi&sig=v7D8gTfCB_5lTRbuyimOt1JW2c#v=onepage&q=shared%2
0fantasy&f=false
Jean, L. (2013, December) Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me How to Write: Analyzing the
Parallels Between Guides for New Teachers and Tabletop Roleplaying Manuals. Retrieved from
http://humboldt-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/2148/1655/Jean_Laurel_ENTWMA_Fall2013.pdf?sequenc
e=1