Anyone in Germany who gets involved with pen-and-paper role-playing games soon encounters something distinctive: German and English rulebooks sit quite naturally side by side on many shelves. And that is not necessarily because no German edition exists.
Even when a role-playing game has been translated in full, many players deliberately choose the English original—sometimes even when everyone at the table speaks German. This is rarely just stubbornness or showing off. It has more to do with the fact that language in a role-playing game is more than simply a translation of the rules.
The original is still the original
With a novel, probably few people would insist that it must always be read in its original language. Good translations can be excellent. Role-playing games, however, add another dimension: a rulebook consists not only of matter-of-fact instructions, but also of terminology, names, descriptions, wordplay and flavour text—sometimes with a very distinctive way of conveying a world through language. A term may be perfectly translatable and still feel different.
This does not mean that the German translation must be inferior. Good German editions often involve an enormous amount of work and make a game properly accessible to many people in the first place. But readers of the original receive the exact terminology and phrasing the authors originally intended for their world. For some players, that is simply part of the experience.
If you want to play early, you often end up with English automatically
One very practical reason is publication timing. Many role-playing games originate in the English-speaking world: the core rulebook appears there first, followed later by adventures, expansions, campaigns or supplements. A German translation naturally takes time. Anyone looking forward to a new system or a particular expansion therefore eventually has to decide whether to wait or buy the English book—and for groups that are already comfortable with English, this is usually an easy choice.
There is another factor: not every book is translated at all. Major systems have a relatively good chance of receiving a German edition, but the smaller or more specialised a role-playing game becomes, the more often English remains the only available language. Anyone who enjoys games beyond the biggest names will therefore find it difficult to avoid English rulebooks entirely.
The English-speaking RPG world is enormous
The difference becomes even clearer outside the rulebook itself. Whether the question concerns a rule, experiences with a particular campaign or how other game masters handled a difficult scene, most answers are found in international communities: forums, wikis, Reddit threads, Discord servers and videos. These almost always use the original English terminology.
That can be surprisingly useful. If the term in your own rulebook is exactly the same as the one used in a discussion or video, there is no need to work out what it was called in a particular translation. With more complex systems, this can make a genuine difference.
And eventually everyone speaks a little role-playing “Denglish” anyway
This creates a small peculiarity at many German gaming tables: the game is played in German, but by no means everything is German. People talk about a skill check, someone mentions their hit points, another person discusses a saving throw—and five minutes later the game master is once again describing in perfectly ordinary German what is happening in the tavern.
Purists could probably debate this for hours, but at the table it rarely matters. The group’s language simply develops from whatever works—and sometimes the English term is simply the one everyone knows.
German still has one enormous advantage
Despite all these arguments, it would be wrong to conclude that English is automatically better. Pen & paper relies on something far more than many other games do: language in its literal, spoken sense. We describe places, conduct conversations, portray characters, improvise and try to create tension, humour, menace or emotion. The language in which we feel genuinely confident is a major advantage in all of this.
A complicated rules passage may be much easier to understand in German. A character may feel more natural to portray. A game master may be able to improvise far more freely. Anyone who has to arrange vocabulary in their head during an emotional scene gains little from the words “Original Edition” on the cover. There is no universal right or wrong answer here.
In the end, atmosphere decides
Then there is one more point that is difficult to put into a table: the atmosphere around the gaming table itself. A role-playing game has to bring a world to life. In a dark horror game, you eventually want to forget that you are sitting at an ordinary table. In fantasy, you want to feel that something might genuinely be lurking behind the next door. And in a good science-fiction RPG, a space station should eventually feel more real in your mind than the living room around it.
Language can help. Sometimes English terminology, names or texts fit the setting perfectly. Sometimes a German translation works just as well—or better—because nobody is mentally pulled out of the scene. The best language version is therefore not automatically the one closest to the original, but the one that creates the best atmosphere at the table. After all, that is why we play.
So: German or English?
The answer is rather unspectacular: whichever allows your group to play best. Players who read English with ease, want early access to new releases and spend time in international RPG communities will probably be very happy with English original editions. For those who prefer to experience stories entirely in German, want to grasp complex rules more quickly or have a group with varying levels of English, the German edition may be the much better choice.
Nobody says you have to choose one side. An English rulebook on the shelf, German conversation at the table and a few English technical terms in between—for many groups, that has long been completely normal.
In the end, the language on the book’s spine is not what matters. What matters is the moment when the rules recede into the background, nobody thinks about translations any more and a shared world suddenly takes shape around the table. When that happens, the language is right—and, above all, so is the atmosphere.