Last March, when rolling lockdowns began, Roll20, one of many sites that host R.P.G.s online, experienced so many new-user requests (an 840 percent spike, in fact) that its servers assumed it was some kind of cyberattack, said Dean Bigbee, the site’s chief operating officer. Not your nerdy teenager’s Dungeons & Dragons.

And who dresses up for Monopoly? But when lockdowns made in-person activities risky, these games, began to proliferate online, attracting new players and reviving interest among veteran, dice-clutching hands. A typical session involves considerably more effort and imagination than, say, Scrabble. R.P.G.s have always been a relatively niche hobby, which is understandable.

A hybrid of theater, make-believe, board games and fan fiction, R.P.G.s encourage players to create a story collaboratively as they play. The form has since proliferated - if you can imagine a genre (western, mystery, sci-fi) or a peril (zombies, rogue A.I., chthonic gods), it has probably inspired a game. Modern role-playing games debuted in the mid-1970s, when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented Dungeons & Dragons. On Tuesdays, he gathers friends, colleagues, partners and kids and has them ramble, remotely, through his role-playing game, Curse of the Sugarplum Fairy, a madcap riff on “The Nutcracker” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Tagline: “Who can take a rainbow and wrap it in a scream?” This was an average evening for Mike Sell, a professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who moonlights as an online game master. Together they explored candy-coated barracks, searching for an elusive queen cat jokes crowded the chat.

The cleric, wearing nifty resin dragon horns, took hallucinogenic mushrooms. Recently, a wizard, a druid, a cleric, a ranger, an artificer and a couple of bards met on Zoom.

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