Role-playing games are a lot like life.

Or maybe it’s the other way around—life is a lot like a role-playing game.

We make decisions based on our goals and motivations, influenced by our perception of the situation. We build relationships, make discoveries, and solve mysteries. We act upon, react to, and interact with our environment. Along the way, we improve our skills and pick up new ones.

But there’s a key difference between real life and role-playing games: in real life, it’s all too easy to become an NPC—just another non-player character in the background.

We fall into routines, go with the flow, avoid making hard choices, and take the path of least resistance. Before we know it, we’ve become a background player in our own story. In role-playing games, we aren’t always the heroic protagonist either; sometimes, we’re just an agonist, a character caught up in events. But what matters most is that we choose to engage. We take an active role in the experience.

That’s the crucial difference—stepping up instead of sitting back, taking action rather than letting life happen to us.

Sometimes, role-playing games feel more real than our everyday lives precisely because they give us this sense of agency. They train us, in a way, to take charge of our own narrative.

One of my favorite RPGs, Circle of Hands, stands out for this reason. In the game, characters are forced to make difficult decisions and take sides—there’s no external authority handing down orders or moral clarity. The Circle Knights arrive at a situation, realize something’s wrong, and decide to act. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they fail. But they try.

That sticks with me. Too often in real life, we see what needs changing—within ourselves or in the world around us—and we hesitate. We let the moment pass. We stay quiet.

At this point in my life, I want to be more like a Circle Knight. Less of a passive observer. More of an active participant in my own story—and the world’s.

Because in both life and role-playing games, how we approach the experience matters.

We can play to win. We can try to control every aspect of the narrative. Or, we can choose to focus on the experience itself—acting from the authentic motivations of our character or ourselves.

And in the end, the real story—in life or the game—is only fully visible when it’s over.