Most tabletop roleplaying games let gamers create fantastical heroes, but then there are RPGs that go the meta-fictional route and tell stories about people who play roleplaying games. Some of the RPGs below are about kids who played early Dungeons & Dragons during the 1980s, while others are about people playing MMOs in the near future. The common mechanic of each is a double character creation system, where players put together a narrative description of a "gamer" character, then describe the RPG character this fictional gamer chooses to create.
People have been designing and playing tabletop RPGs since the mid-1970s, and the experience of playing RPGs with others has gone through many changes, iterations, and transformations in the 45+ years since. Gamers from each generation, whether they're players of vintage old-school dungeon-crawls or people connecting online through modern MMOs, have their own unique stories about the RPGs they once played with their friends and the shenanigans they got up to.
The tabletop RPGs listed in this article are essentially about friendship – not the friendship of adventuring parties in an RPG setting, but the ties between people who meet up on the weekend to chow down on snacks, roll dice, and weave stories born from both their imaginations and real-life struggles. Sometimes the stories of these fictional gaming groups end well, and sometimes they don't; either way, the made-up RPGs within these meta-fictional RPGs are catalysts for the "PCs" and their own PCs to grow and change.
Venture & Dungeon Is A Great Meta TTRPG
Venture & Dungeon is a book on itch.io with two complementary RPGs - one by Riley Rethal, the other by Jay Dragon, both using the dice-less "Belonging Outside Belonging" system. In Venture, players collaborate to tell a classic D&D-style story of heroic fantasy, albeit with an introspective approach to character creation where a PC's personality, dreams, and inner struggles influence the abilities they have and the adventures they encounter. Dungeon, in contrast, is about a gaming group of teens playing an RPG with characters and monsters analogous to their high school lives - a nurturing kid who stands up for their friends might play a Paladin, while a stalker or snoop at school might take the form of a monster with countless eyes during a "game session."
.Dungeon Is A TTRPG About Playing An MMO
.Dungeon is an RPG system designed to tell stories about a group of gamers playing a fictional, futuristic MMO together - a procedurally generated multiplayer world that can incorporate settings and stories from other RPGs or fantasy books into its own simulated universe. The straightforward, flexible mechanics of .Dungeon are designed to make it easy for GMs and players to stitch elements from their favorite fantasy works together into a coherent game setting, while the attributes, skills, and classes of PCs are designed to simulate the abilities of MMO characters and the personalities of their "players."
The DIE RPG Is A Great TTRPG About People Playing A D&D-Type Game
In DIE, a horror fantasy comic that deconstructs the "trapped in another world" trope seen in works like Chronicles Of Narnia (or the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon), a group of teenagers playing a new D&D-style tabletop RPG get sucked into a world of magic and imbued with the powers of the characters they created; 27 years after escaping back to the real world, these same gamers, now adults with lives of their own and lingering traumas, are dragged back to this world by a deranged Game Master to finish what they started.
Kieron Gillen, the writer of DIE, wound up creating an actual tabletop RPG system, modeled after the first arc of his comic book series. In the opening narrative of a DIE RPG session, the players create a group of friends who get together to create characters in a mysterious new Dungeons & Dragons-esque tabletop RPG system. After being magically transported to the icosahedronal world of DIE, the "players" try to find a way back home while grappling with the traumatic aspects of the "characters" they created. Meanwhile, the actual players of the DIE RPG roll pools of six-sided dice along with D4s, D8s, D10s, and D12s that embody the powers of character classes such as the Fool, the Godbinder, the Dictator, or the Emotion Knight.
Sources: DIE Comic RPG, itch.io