RPG Episode

Fat Neil: So you guys suddenly wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons?
Troy: Yeah. Why wouldn't we? [the study group joins in with affirmations] It's cool. And when you play it, it makes you happy, like a dragon.

— Community, "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons"

The characters act in an episode emulating a role-playing game, either mirroring a tabletop game or Western RPG, JRPG, or MMORPG. Either they're playing as in-game characters, having some imaginative dream sequence, or the normal Medieval European Fantasy sequence gets derailed by it. Due to the popularity of specific forms of RPG in certain regions, it's common to see Western media referencing Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft, Eastern media referencing Ragnarok Online, and Japanese media referencing Dragon Quest. That said, it's more than possible to see references to any type of RPG, no matter the work's country of origin, and some creators are more than willing to shout-out more obscure games.

Note that this is different from shows that are adapted from an RPG (that's The Anime of the Game, which is also inclusive of Western examples such as the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) cartoon), or works that revolve around a Fictional Video Game like .hack or Sword Art Online.

An RPG Episode will almost always be Deep-Immersion Gaming, and if it's an MMORPG one, will inevitably introduce us to UltimateGamer386 (be they a main character or the episode's antagonist).

Compare Campaign Comic, where the entire comic's Framing Device is a Tabletop RPG campaign.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Hunter × Hunter has a fake RPG arc in the form of the Greed Island arc.
• The second episode of Sasami San Ganbaranai has Sasami, Kamiomi and the Yagami sisters playing an MMO...until they get sucked into it.
• The second episode of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi pulls this off wonderfully, and it's one of the few shows where not only is this episode fully canon (none of that "it's a dream" crap), it's also totally important to the plot.
• Welcome to the NHK, where the main character's newest bad habit was playing Ultimate Fantasy ("Welcome to the Taru Taru").
• Gaming Otaku Hare in Hare+Guu gets sucked into playing one, figuratively and literally, dubbed AmeQuest III.
• Love Hina did a dream sequence version, where the RPG roots were more emphasized in the animated version.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Some of the magical mechanics are explained this way to the students. The newest adaptation is especially fond of these, replacing hexagonal speech balloon sequences with dungeon maps complete with status screens.
  • In fact, the manga tends to have many refernces to RPGs, particularily when Haruna learns about magic. She often mentions wanting to up her level and in one part complains that a monster is too high level for them to fight.
  • The Mundus Magicus feels a lot more like an RPG than perhaps is good for it, and the overall concept is evocative of the plot from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In some regard, this could be called an example of an RPG series.
• Paranoia Agent did an entire episode where the suspect for Lil' Slugger sucked the two investigating policemen into his delusion that the entire world was a Dragon Quest video game, complete with Akira Toriyama-based Art Shift.
• Hayate the Combat Butler
  • In a filler episode, those three girls are sucked into an old RPG and forced to find the final boss.
  • Volume 6 of the manga had an RPG mini-arc where Hayate, Nagi, and a few others entered a dungeon beneath a church to find a medal to help Hayate get his "butler" status back after losing a race. Yukiji-sensei came along, actually claiming to be Deedlit.
  • This showed up in the second series as well.
• Here is Greenwood ran its cast through Here is Devilwood an obvious RPG pastiche (which made it as one of the OAV episodes). Though it was explained that they were making a movie.
• Gestalt OAV 1. The main character can, for a while, speak only in RPG-style blue text boxes.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In the manga (and the the first Toei series fans like to call "Season Zero"), Yugi and his friends were playing a Tabletop RPG against Bakura (or, as it turned out, the evil alter-ego living in his Millenium Ring, who became a literal Killer Game Master). This happens again during the final arc of the manga: what the Pharaoh and company think is the world of his memories, or possibly time travel, turns out to be a Tabletop RPG game set up by Bakura. They play a similar game in the animated version, but it was less of an RPG board game with defined rules and more of an interactive TV screen featuring the past, as the anime version is focused on the card game and not games in general.
  • The anime has a short story arc lasting roughly three episodes in which the main characters played a virtual reality video game RPG against the "Big 5" Board of Directors for control of Kaiba Corp.
• Ghost Sweeper Mikami has an chapter/episode where the protagonists are sucked into a possessed RPG.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • The anime episode "Mysterique Sign" only has one scene like this, but it includes Turn-Based Combat, attack calling and all the characters standing spaced out in a line. Lampshaded when a scarab flies by and heals the "boss" (a giant sort-of-cave cricket) with a text box showing up and everything.
  • This trope is played out in its entirety in the original novels with the short story Haruhi Suzumiya Theater.
• Konata from Lucky Star often plays an (unnamed) MMORPG in her spare time, but in the anime it's never actually shown what's on her screen as she plays. The OVA, however, has one segment where Konata, Nanako and the Hiiragi twins play the RPG together, and they're depicted as their game characters for the whole segment.
• To Love Ru's "Trouble Quest" arc. The girls end up with decent classes, but Rito, ever the Unlucky Everydude, gets Florist. It has its advantages.
• Excel♡Saga had an episode emulating a dating sim being played by Il Palazzo, whose decisions in the game affected the show's characters.
• One of the SD Gundam OAVs features the main characters from the first three Gundam shows in a parody of fantasy RPGs. It even shows the characters HP going down when they get hit. The later Knight Gundam OAVs are basically a slightly more serious version of this.
• Magician's Academy had one that even had an Art Shift to little 8-bit sprites for the characters.
• In episode 2 of the Kujibiki♡Unbalance OAV, one of the contests is a dungeon crawl, complete with Role-Playing Game Terms. In a Shout-Out to NetHack, one of the teams is accompanied by a cat, who at one point eats a dead enemy.
• Pani Poni Dash! lampoons everything else, so why not RPGs? The art changed to a more chibi, Dragon Quest-ish format complete with text boxes and fake stat gains in silly statistics.
• Gintama:
  • The series does this during the Owee arc where they're in a virtual reality RPG. Gintoki gets poisoned and can't move while Kagura goes to fight the Final boss... just to get a generic flower for said poisoning. Did we mention they were using NPCs as weapons, and when they actually removed the helmets Gintoki saw they pretty much nearly killed the audience and were choking Shinpachi?
  • In a other episode, the main characters join the MMORPG Monkey Hunter in an attempt to locate some aliens who turned them into screwdrivers.
  • The Yorozuya get their RPG on again to fight a virus infecting Tama. The Party meets the Leukocyte King and finds out that getting turned into an 8-bit pixel sprite is probably one of the worst things that could possibly happen.
• Episode 13 of Chobits features a MMORPG played by Hideki and friends.
• Superior has a chapter where Exa must climb a tower in order to obtain a new sword while defeating/running away from the chasing skeletons (Hilarity Ensues). In the first chapter the monster the group encounters have their HP displayed for comedic purposes (HP 1/1).
• First part of the second half of the anime, Kaze no Stigma does this both in canon and as a plot point, except it's actually people summoning and binding demons onto themselves under an internet page telling them that it's a real-life MMO. Who says LARPing is for sissies?
• Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku:
  • The manga has several chapters where the four main characters play an MMORPG together, even though one of them isn't much of a gamer and the biggest gamer isn't a fan the genre. The avatars reflect their personalities: Narumi is a cute Elf assassin, Hanako is a sexy mage, Tarou is a stolid swordsman, and Hirotaka is a high-level archer with joke equipment. The session plays out as an extension of their offline interactions, bickering and all, that culminates in gamer Hirotaka practically one-shotting a rare monster that had threatened the other three with a Total Party Kill. Later chapters reveal that Kou plays the same MMO as a high-level gunner, and Naoya later joins her as a Cat Boy who starts off as very weak since he's not used to playing video games in general.
  • Lampshaded in episode 7, whose cold open shows a chibi version of Tarou defeating an enemy monster. The narration assures the viewer that yes, they are still indeed watching the slice-of-life anime Wotakoi, and the RPG segue is not a mistake.
• In the fourth volume of Houkago Play, the couples from previous volumes get together and play a tabletop RPG.
• Chapter 2 of the Kaguya-sama: Love Is War light novel spin-off centers around Shirogane, Ishigami, Kashiwagi, and Tsubasa trying out LARPing for the first time.

Comic Books

• In the '80's, Jack Chick, a maker of So Bad, It's Good extremist Christian Comic Books came out with one entitled "Dark Dungeons". Though ironic worship of Jack Chick in general has developed into a cult of sorts, "Dark Dungeons", specifically, has inspired countless parodies within Geekdom. Google the phrase and you'll see.
  • This one was adapted into a live-action film, with the approval of Jack Chick himself. However, the acting and dialogue are so over-the-top it's hard not to see it as a tongue-in-cheek Stealth Parody.
• From the Disney Mouse and Duck Comics universe, there's the comic story "The Black Orb". Donald, Goofy, and Mickey are playing a role-playing game as, respectively, a cowardly fighter, an inept mage, and a snarky thief to take back a magic orb from an evil wizard. The whole thing ends with Donald cracking under pressure during the climax and Mickey ultimately saving the day, but after Mickey and Goofy go home, Donald reimagines the ending with himself as a Marty Stu.
• Sunnyville Stories has the story "Games People Play" with Sam's cousin, Eddie, holding a fantasy game session with Rusty, Sam, Sam's little brother Jason and young Donny Hopper. It's interrupted by Rusty's mom and Donny's mom, who have forbidden their sons to play such games.
• In The Maze Agency #22, Jennifer and Gabe enter the world of dungeons, dragons, and death when Tony Hawthorne, a young player of a popular role-playing game is found murdered—just hours after his character was killed. The trail leads to Gameco, the gaming company where Tony had worked.

Fan Works

• This is the plot of the Umineko: When They Cry fan VN, "Witches and Woodlands". A major theme of the story is how being a good Game Master means not just knowing the rules, but also being able to craft a rich, compelling game world for the players to enjoy.
• Done in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Ponies Play D&D, years before the show actually made an episode about it.
• The Time Fixers: Nicktoons of the Future episode "World of Weirdos" has Tammy and Tommy getting trapped in their favorite virtual MMORPG called "World of Cyborgs and Dragons".
• Love Is a Mystery, the twelfth installment of Skyhold Academy Yearbook, has two separate instances of Varric acting as the game master for his friends as they play Gatehouses and Ghouls. Being something of a Meta Guy, he deliberately invokes a number of tropes, starting with You All Meet in an Inn.

Literature

• Similar to Dark Dungeons, the slightly less silly novel Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe and the TV Movie adaptation sought to impress on us an Aesop about getting too wrapped up in fantasy. Jaffe based the novel loosely on a true story. While James Dallas Egbert III was indeed a player of Dungeons & Dragons, the tunnel event was totally unrelated to the game and actually involved his first suicide attempt due to depression from academic pressure and drug addiction.
• Similarly, Hobgoblin shows a boy who gets too wrapped up in his roleplaying game and the effect it has on him. Like Mazes and Monsters, it implies that All RPGers Are LARPers.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In season six, the Nerd Herd first decided to embark on a life of crime while in the middle of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Their abuse of their many talents calls to mind power-gamers.
  • There was a scene in one of the last episodes where it sounds like the characters are planning out their attack and it turns out that they're playing D&D.
  • D&D figured into a couple of Angel episodes as well, with the rich guy Angel helped in season 1, who was also a big time D&D player.
• In the Crossing Jordan episode "Strangled", Jordan and the gang solve a historical murder by role-playing it. This was in season two, of course, when that sort of thing happened every week — but not usually for the entire episode.
• In Freaks and Geeks one of the cool "freaks" finds out he likes to play Dungeons & Dragons with the "geeks". The geeks, in turn, feel they have their very existence validated by this discovery.
• One episode of How I Met Your Mother has Ted ask a girl out while playing World of Warcraft. They showed a bulky knight in armor talking to a girl in a bikini. The joke is that Ted's character is the girl in the bikini.
• Lizzie McGuire has an episode where Gordo became addicted (almost literally) to an RPG called "Dwarflord".
• Community:
  • An interesting version happens in the second season episode called "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" where Jeff and the gang try to help clinically depressed Fat Neil by playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons with him. There's no Deep-Immersion Gaming; almost the entire episode consists of the gang sitting around a table playing the game. However, this is contrasted with epic music and a hammy narrator, neither of which would sound out of place in The Lord of the Rings. The episode as a whole is an Affectionate Parody of fantasy tropes in general. Also, seeing as so often portrayals of the game show it being addictive/dangerous/Satanic, as this very page can attest to, it was a breath of fresh air to see it portrayed as a way to help someone.
  • The fifth season episode "Advanced Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" sees the Save Greendale committee try to use a session of D&D to reconcile criminology professor Buzz Hickey with his estranged older son. Instead, they split into two competing groups as the Hickeys sublimate their personal issues into their characters—Tiny Nuggins, a Halfling Thief (father) vs. Tristram Steelheart, a Holy Cleric (son).
• The main characters of Warehouse 13 find themselves in a virtual-reality version when Fargo is trapped within the game. In an interesting twist, the events of the game prove to be affected by the thoughts and fears of the players.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • "The Barbarian Sublimation": Penny gets hooked on Age of Conan. When she gets too into it, Leonard enters the game and tries to reason with her. She chops off his head. Penny finally quits when she finds herself accepting a date with Howard's character, "Sir Howard of Wolowitz."
    Penny: ...oh, my God, I need help.
  • "The Hot Troll Deviation": Bernadette breaks up with Howard because his World of Warcraft character went out with "Glissinda the hot troll". Glissinda turned out to be a fat guy from facilities management.
  • "The Zarnecki Incursion": Someone hacks Sheldon's WOW account, and the guys find the culprit and set out to confront him, treating it as a quest.
  • The guys are often seen playing the fictional Collectible Card Game Mystical Warlords of Ka'a. One episode has them playing the Expansion Pack "Wild West and Witches".
  • In one Christmas Episode, the guys opt to play a special Christmas-themed D&D quest narrated by Leonard to rescue Santa Claus. It's notable in that Sheldon finally reveals his (fairly valid) reasons for disliking Christmas, ultimately betraying his friends to leave Santa to a grisly fate. Father Christmas was not amused.
  • In "The Love Spell Potential", Penny, Bernadette and Amy miss out on a Vegas trip. So they join the guys in a game, which ultimately ends up with Amy quitting when it is used as an opportunity to mock her and Sheldon's relationship.
  • "The Fermentation Bifurcation" see Sheldon playing a game solo with Bernadette when her pregnancy causes her to be left out of the group's normal activities for the night. Doubles as a Pet the Dog moment for Sheldon in that he specifically designed the game to help Bernadette take a break from her condition by roleplaying as someone who could enjoy a platter of sushi, some good liquor, a professional massage, and beating down some opponents in combat.
• Forever Knight had Nick being pulled into an MMORPG in order to find the killer with 'The Games Vampires Play'.
• CSI: NY spent two episodes dealing with a killer who played Second Life. The main episode was "Down The Rabbit Hole," and Mac had to go into the game to try and find info on the victim and the killer, who was finally caught several episodes later in "DOA for a Day."
• The IT Crowd: One episode has Jen instructed to take a bunch of alpha-male business clients out on the town. They want to go to a strip club, so Jen hands off responsibility to Moss to entertain them. Instead, he guides them through a role-playing game. They're confused and annoyed, but after the commercial break, we discover that they've become completely invested in the game and greatly enjoy themselves. At the same time, Moss uses the game to help Roy work through his grief over a failed relationship.
• Super Sentai has thrown the Rangers into RPG adventures from time to time:
  • In Shuriken Sentai Ninninger, the Ninningers' grandpa sends them into an RPG as a way to help Nagi figure out which career path he wants to follow. While Nagi plays himself and remains a ninja, the rest of the team "reclasses": Takaharu becomes a warrior, Yakumo is a wizard (naturally, as he already practices magic), Kinji is a knight, Kasumi is a priestess, and Fuuka is an elf.
  • Uchu Sentai Kyuranger: Some of the Kyurangers are trapped in an RPG by the villains, and seem to be assigned classes based on humor value: Lucky is a witch (and his catchphrase is what triggers the fireball spell, leading to a couple Magic Misfires), Nice Guy Spada becomes a rough-edged barbarian, The Stoic Stinger is a jester so he keeps involuntarily breaking into song and dance, and the kid of the group Kotaro is the noble knight. Plus Champ, the big masculine guy of the team, is treated as the princess they need to save, but he doesn't dress or act the part except as an Imagine Spot.
• The episode "Charlie Rules The World" of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia focuses on the gang getting hooked on a browser game called Techpocalypse. Dee spends money mostly on cosmetics, Mac loses a lot of fights, Frank has lots of online sex, and Charlie, as the name implies, ends up taking to it Like A Fish To Water and becomes the head of a powerful group. Dennis insists that the game is for people who cannot function in reality, but nearly has a nervous breakdown over not having power anymore.
• Star Trek: Voyager. Several of the holodeck programs have aspects of role-playing games in a Does This Remind You of Anything? manner. The episode "Heroes & Demons" is probably the closest example, when the Doctor has to enter a simulation of Beowulf to find out why several crewmen playing it have gone missing.
• Young Sheldon: In "A Musty Crypt and a Stick to Pee On", Sheldon sets up a D&D game, but when Tam and Billy don't make it, he has to make do with Missy, Connie and Dale.

Podcasts

• Part of Sequinox episode 14 takes place in a fantasy-RPG world. Winter's a wizard, Autumn's a rogue, Summer's a fighter, Spring's a druid, and Vivaldi's a bard.

Video Games

• The "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" DLC for Borderlands 2 is told through the aforementioned Tiny Tina, along with the Vault Hunters from the previous game, playing a tabletop RPG while the Vault Hunters from 2 beat up a Hyperion informant.
  • Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is effectively the Dragon Keep DLC expanded into its own game (along with a bevy of new fantasy-specific features and classes). Once again, the game is focused on yet another campaign run by Tina with a new set of players.
• Super Paper Mario:
  • Somewhat an example, in Chapter 3 Peach goes through a "fake dating simulator RPG" with the Evil Nerd Boss. but since none of the options you choose change anything, she eventually gets fed up and blows it up anyway.
  • In the Underwhere, you face a three-headed Chain Chomp known as the Underchomp. It's fought in traditional, turn-based RPG style as opposed to the rest of the game, which is a cross between an RPG and a platformer.
• One quest in Fable III has your character (voluntarily) shrunken down to the size of a miniature and placed in the tabletop RPG campaign being run by three nerds.
• The Simpsons Game, along with many other video game parodies, has a level called "Never Quest" where Homer and Marge are in a Fantasy RPG-based world. Homer and Lisa also run through a JRPG based world called "Super Happy Fun Fun Game".
• One of the bosses in Kirby Super Star is fought in a way that resembles an RPG. It will attack and become vulnerable based on the on screen text boxes. Kirby even gains experience points after the battle (not that it matters).
• In Wai Wai World 2, one level is titled "Final Twinbee Quest Gaiden!?" The joke is that it's a Twinbee-like shmup level, but set in a stereotypical Eastern RPG World Map and dungeon.
• One of the dungeons in Persona 4 resembles a dungeon in an NES-era JRPG. The boss of said dungeon resembles a knight character made of giant pixels concealing a big-brained baby.
• Ensemble Stars! has the story Round Game, which revolves around a few of the first-years playing a mobile-based RPG (naturally, since Ensemble Stars is itself a mobile game). Suiting their personalities, Tsukasa plays a knight, Tetora a warrior, Hajime a bishop, and Shinobu a thief.
• In Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, Chloe can optionally play a little of D&D with Steph and Mikey, two other Blackwell students, the former being the game master. Steph returns in Life Is Strange: True Colors, in which she eventually hosts a LARP campaing.

Webcomics

• One arc of Because I'm Depressed has Ben and Diego revisit an unfinished campaign of "Dungeons & Knockoffs" from their high school years, with Eve as their DM.
• Bitmap World occasionally has its characters enter an online MMORPG called "Cosmic Dungeon", based loosely on World of Warcraft. Of course, their game avatars look just like their "real" selves, wearing costumes.
• The characters of Something*Positive have a set of RPG strips for the holiday season.
• Sluggy Freelance had an arc involving Torg, Riff, and Zoe's addition to an MMO titled Years of Yarncraft which was essentially an extended World of Warcraft parody.
• Dresden Codak has on two occasions featured Kim and co. playing Dungeons and Discourse, where magic is replaced with philosophy and psychology. Both times, Dimitri turned evil on the rest of the party. And now, the fans have made a real version.
• Sequential Art featured a short story where the characters play Pip's tabletop RPG "Realm of Lorcraft." The Think Tank joined together as a knight, with Art as a mage and Katt as an assassin. The squirrels skipped every turn, making Pip think they were planning some huge mega-spell, but all they ended up doing was immobilizing the Lord of Evil so Art and Katt could win the game while he was distracted.
• While Darths & Droids is a Campaign Comic, it inserts some meta-humor by re-interpreting the scene where the droids play a board game with Chewie as the player characters playing an RPG in-game. The RPG version of Show Within a Show, if you will.

Web Original

• One of the levels of Pikadevil's Hell in We Are Our Avatars.
• In their yearly April Fools' Day gag-sub, TV-Nihon made Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger episode 2 into a giant LARPing adventure with equal amounts of role-playing jokes to Lampshade Hanging over the re-use of ideas and terms from other Dinosaur series.

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: In "Loft in Bedslation", Bob must assist a new Dungeon Master. While Bob, Gene, and Tina don’t connect with the tabletop game, Bob helps a customer learn a lesson along the way.
• The Dexter's Laboratory episode "D & DD" involved Dexter and his friends playing "Monsters and Mazes"; when Dee Dee asks to join, the guys (who are sick of Dexter's Killer Game Master attitude) enthusiastically go along with it.
• The Kim Possible episode "Virt-U-Ron" revolved around the fictional MMORPG Everlot.
• South Park:
  • "Make Love, Not Warcraft" revolved around the boys' obsession with World of Warcraft, using Blizzard's actual software and one of their developer servers that was being used to develop/test Burning Crusade to film the in-game scenes, making the episode part machinima.
  • They did The Lord of the Rings in "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers", with Cartman as Gandalf, his Fellowship on a quest (to return a pornographic videotape)...
  • In "The Black Friday Trilogy", all the kids LARP a Game of Thrones-inspired adventure to see which gaming console would be more popular on Black Friday.
• The Simpsons episode "Marge Gamer" revolved around Marge's discovery of an MMORPG called Earthland Realms, of which her son Bart is the Big Bad known as the "Shadow Knight". Oddly enough, every other inhabitant of Springfield other than Homer is also a subscriber, and other than Bart everyone seems to mostly just play with the crafting and trade systems ignoring combat entirely.
• American Dad! had an episode that split time with an MMORPG played by Steve and his friends, complete with an Art Shift into a more detailed Animesque style.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh features this in an episode where the eponymous character and friends are in the attic. In an unusual variation, they're actually playing chess. Or at least, they think they are; they don't really have any clue how chess is played. For one thing, Rabbit think it's supposed to have a magician and refers to every other piece as if there were only one of each — not unlike an RPG. The episode may also have been a homage to Through the Looking Glass.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • TMNT: Back to the Sewer has a MMORPG example in the episode "SuperQuest", where the turtles enter themselves into the video game in order to obtain some of Master Splinter's data bits which had made their way into the games core. Once inside, the turtles go on a quest in order to receive a reward which includes said data bits. Mikey plsyd as a warrior, Leo as a shapeshifter, Donnie as a wizard, Raph as a jester and Hun as a thief.
  • In the 2012 cartoon, the Turtles get interested in the tabletop game Mazes and Mutants, but end up getting sucked into an actual dungeon by another M&M fan who wanted friends to play with. Donatello stayed a wizard as in the '03 cartoon, but Leonardo was a knight, Michelangelo was an elf, and Raphael was a barbarian.
• Danny Phantom has an episode dedicated to this: "Teacher of the Year." The trio and Mr. Lancer are all big fans of the MMORPG Doomed.
• The Direct-to-DVD Futurama movie "Bender's Game" revolved around Bender playing Dungeons & Dragons until eventually they find themselves in the fantasy world of Cornwood. The story's based off The Lord of the Rings but still counts.
• Pretty much the entire point of ReBoot's games. Only the characters assume the roles of the antagonists of the games, since the User plays as the protagonist.
  • A literal example drops down in the episode "Wizards, Warriors, And A Word From Our Sponsor." The game is a fairly typical RPG where the user takes the role of a four person adventure team, necessitating Bob and his friends becoming an opposing one as they race for a magic chalice. Bob is quite upset when he reboots into the game and is turned into a thief, while Mike the TV took the role of the warrior.
• The Duck Dodgers episode MMORPD. Too Bad the game was over as the hero was about to get his kiss.
• The Regular Show episode entitled "But I Have A Receipt" depicts the show's characters playing a RPG tableside as well as being mystically transported into the RPG game world for a final confrontation with the game store owner who sold them the game.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Dungeons & Discords" has Discord joining Spike and Big Macintosh on their secret "guys' night" activities, which turn out to be a game of Ogres & Oubliettes.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • "The Console" sees all of Elmore turned into a pastiche of JRPGs by Gumball's new hand-held game system. The characters abuse the Sudden Game Interface, sometimes using it as a Ninja Prop.
  • They did The Master where Richard makes the family play a role-playing game to stop their arguing.
• Gravity Falls: In "Dungeons, Dungeons, & More Dungeons", Dipper bonds with the Author of the Journals over the eponymous tabletop RPG, since Grunkle Stan and Mabel think it's too nerdy and complicated. Then a magical "infinite-sided" die accidentally summons Probabilitor the Annoying, a villainous NPC from the game.
• Total DramaRama: In "Cody the Barbarian", the toddlers end up in a virtual reality action RPG game.
• In the Trollhunters episode "Just Add Water" has the three trolls in Jim's basement talking about violently murdering guards, then it's revealed that they're just playing an RPG. The next episode, (the same as "Just Add Water" but Steve and Eli's side of the story) reveals that the pair were eavesdropping on this conversation and thought they were speaking literally.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has the season two episode "Roll with It", where the A-plot has Glimmer, Bow, and the rest of the Princess Alliance turn a mission planning session into a series of these, much to Adora's frustration.
• The Powerpuff Girls (2016): In "Phantasm Chasm", the sisters and their friend Jared get warped into the world of a tabletop game called "Phantasm Chasm".
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: Season 6 Episode 3, "Monsters & Mana", features the team bonding over an Altean equivalent of D&D, complete with character sheet tablets, a holographic board, and 20 sided dice with Altean numbers. While the majority of the episode is shown as Deep-Immersion Gaming, there are occasional breaks to the real world, as well as an Art Shift to 16 bit sprites, and at one point Allura clicking on a MOBA-esque cooldown timer.

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