Okay, odd question that occurred to me, but…are there any comic book characters who play, or have occasionally been shown playing, tabletop RPGs? Like Dungeons and Dragons, and the like?
(Manga doesn’t count, for the record.)
I know, it’s not exactly the kind of pastime that Batman or Captain America would likely spend their time on, much less to enough extent that you’d devote valulable page space to showing; but, comics as a medium have a long history, and it doesn’t seem impossible that over the last 40 years, some character of the right age and demographic might get a panel or two showing them playing D&D as a bit of backstory, or even as a gag. I could see Spider-Man doing that, for instance.
Like I said, an odd, silly question. But I’m honestly curious, and I could use a chuckle. So…any reports?
If you mean any comic book character, there is a whole book Knights of the Dinner Table devoted to following a couple of different groups of characters who play D&D (sorry Hackmaster, the non IP-violating roleplaying game) and the strips are primarily focused on their actions and interactions around the gaming table.
I’m like 90% sure at some point The Runaways are shown playing an RPG. They for sure have shown at least one character playing an MMORPGs.
There’s a Star Trek Enterprise Novel where some of the crew plays an RPG. It was one of the first and was written before the show aired very long so the characters were not really well understood so it was pretty clear the author was just padding the book.
One could argue that every holodeck episode of Star Trek is an RPG. (or LARP, to be precise).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a comic, and an episode of the show had some of the characters playing an RPG.
Also, in the 1st Maguire Spiderman, Peter Parker has a Magic: The Gathering poster on his wall: Imgur: The magic of the Internet (not an RPG, but in the ballpark. I could totally see young Peter Parker playing D&D)
If we’re going to go there, in Love & Key, Jamal (one of Kinsey’s friends) is shown playing what appears to be Magic (or possibly Yu-Gi-Oh…at the level of detail, it could be either of those two, but given the characters’ ages, I assume Magic is more likely).
In the mid-80’s Legion of Super-Heroes, a number of the heroes were shown to be playing a futuristic version (holograms and the like) of what’s clearly D&D. I know Sun Boy and Star Boy were into it, I don’t recall off-hand who else was. Chameleon Boy and Invisible Kid, maybe.
Brainiac 5 was aware of the game, but didn’t seem to be a hard-core gamer. But I recall one issue in which he was working on a time-travel problem, left his lab, went into the rec room and interrupted a game in progress to try a move, which he said was occupying his mind a bit, so he thought he could concentrate better on the time-travel problem if he just played it out to see how it would work and he’d stop thinking about it…and then we just went right back to the lab.
D’oh - Didn’t see that Kamino Neko already mentioned this
In one of the Borderlands 2 expansions, the PCs get together to play a tabletop game (Bunkers & Badasses) and you then get to play through the module as the character that the PC is playing… there were Borderlands comics, so this kind of counts.
DC had a series called The Warlord (basically a sword-and-sorcery mishmash of Pellucidar, a bit of John Carter, hollow-Earth stories, etc.) and in its issue #35 (July 1980) the main character, Travis Morgan, got bounced around from nutty scene to nutty scene at the whim of a couple of dice-rolling pseudogods (the artist and editor of the series) who were essentially playing D&D with his life.
