What is a roleplaying game (RPG) ?

Perhaps you've thrilled at the exploits of Conan the Barbarian, marveled at Frodo's adventures in Tolkien's Middle Earth, felt your heart race when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, or shivered with excitement as 007 raced against time to save the world. Whether you were reading a book or watching a movie, the characters and the story captured your imagination. There are many wonderful stories out there. When you play a roleplaying game, you and your fellow players create your own heroic characters and, together, develop your own stories.

Roleplaying is a hobby that stresses cooperation, teamwork, stimulation of the mind, competitive spirit, goal orientation, and above all, having fun. In roleplaying games, you build friendships. Put this together with a steady source of entertainment, and you can see that roleplaying games offer many benefits unavailable from more common forms of entertainment.

But what exactly is roleplaying? It is kind of like the Make-Believe you played as a child, when you played the doctor, teacher, soldier, or nurse. When you played Make-Believe, you put yourself in the role of those people and played out their activities as you envisioned them. The doctor and nurse took care of the sick stuffed animals. The soldier shot imaginary enemies. The teacher pretended to write on the blackboard. Whatever roles you and your friends were playing, you pretended to do the things you thought those people would do. That, in essence, is roleplaying.

In a roleplaying game, you and your fellow players tell a story. Each of you designs a character for that story. Depending on the game, your characters could be knights-in-shining-armor, superheroes, private detectives, or whatever you pull out of your imaginations. These characters become the main characters in the story. Throughout the course of the game, you spin the tale of your characters' exploits.

The trick is, you don't know where the story is going. You have some measure of control over the story; you decide what your character does and does not do. However, you do not control the consequences that result from your character's actions, nor do you control the other characters' actions. Thus, the story gradually develops with plenty of plot twists. The person who runs the game, the Game Master ("GM"), is much like a movie director. In a roleplaying game, the players control the main characters, and the GM sets the stage and directs the extras. The GM plans the general challenges that the characters will face in the story. The GM cannot, however, predict the characters' reactions to these challenges because the players determine how their characters will react as the situations arise. Because of this, the story's plot can take turns that surprise, delight, and mentally challenge the players.

During the course of play, your GM describes a situation confronting the characters. In turn, you explain your character's reaction, and the other players relay their own characters' reactions. The GM then describes how the situation has changed as a result of the characters' actions. This is the basic process of roleplaying. It is a constant communication back and forth between you, your fellow players and the GM. You take turns describing your characters' actions and reactions, talking out the interactions between characters, and using dice to randomize whether the characters succeed or fail at their activities.

Dice? A roleplaying game has rules that help you tell your story. Remember when you were a kid playing cops and robbers? When your friend pulled out a capgun and said, "Bang, you're dead," you had to either accept your fate at his word, or argue back and forth until it was decided. Roleplaying rules overcome this inherent shortcoming of Make-Believe. When you create your character, you assign number values to various areas of prowess. These number values define your character. In a roleplaying game, if you want your character to attempt a jump over a 20-foot chasm, you follow the rules procedures to determine whether your character succeeds. You roll dice, then compare the number you roll to the number value in the appropriate character statistic. This determines whether your character succeeds or not. The dice also add a relative random element to the game. The rules help you tell your story, hopefully avoiding arguments like "who shot whom."