Disenchanted Re-enchantment: Comparative Analysis of World of Darkness and Monsterhearts Tabletop RPGs

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two urban fantasy tabletop role-playing games, World of Darkness and Monsterhearts, through the lens of Max Weber's and Charles Taylor's concepts of disenchantment and the counter-process of re-enchantment. Its central argument is that tabletop role-playing games are often described as re-enchanting practices, yet they frequently build supernatural settings around modern, secular logic. This produces disenchanted worlds that merely decorate themselves with pre-modern imagery such as magic and gods, subtly presenting the secular worldview as universal and timeless. The analysis concerns the simulated capacity of these games to represent enchanted worlds rather than their effect on players' own experience of enchantment, and it frames a tabletop role-playing game as a protostory whose stories emerge through the perception and use of interpretative and active affordances.

The analysis finds that World of Darkness, despite thematically engaging with ecological crisis, inequality, and disenchantment itself, is structurally oriented toward disenchantment. Its rules and worldbuilding favor individual agency and the protection of psychic boundaries, and its clear classification of supernatural creatures converts ontological uncertainty into a mere lack of knowledge that characters can resolve. Such design leaves players with few incentives to role-play uncanny feelings as a natural feature of the world. Monsterhearts, by contrast, is presented as offering substantially more affordances for enchantment. Its secondary worlds lack a fixed ontology, drawing instead on multiple myths and tropes, and some character types blur the distinction between human and supernatural. Its String mechanics question the notion of the buffered self, making the game a stronger vehicle for simulating an enchanted world.

The paper concludes that the difficulties of simulating enchantment in tabletop role-playing games arise from conventional approaches to rules and worldbuilding rather than from any inherent limitation of the medium, and that these approaches can be revised. The analysis is conducted through close textual reading of the two game systems and their associated design logic, supported by theoretical frameworks from game studies and the sociology of religion, rather than through empirical player research.