WHAT ARE ROLEPLAYING GAMES (or RPGs)? Role-playing games (RPGs) are open-ended forms of recreation where each player is assigned or creates a game character/personality. This creation can involve just describing the personality (such as one would describe a person in a story), or it can involve alloting a certain number of "points" among various skills and personal attributes for the character, determining what the character excels at. Using this fictional character, the player then interacts with other players inside a storyline created by a special player often called a Game Master (GM) or a Dungeon Master (DM). The Game Master is an author who sets the stage for the story and then allows players to decide what they'd like to do. As the various characters converse and commit actions, the GM determines what the results of those actions are, then tells the players so that they can take new actions. (Computer games are basically the same thing, except that a computer program is telling the player what has happened, based on her actions.) Eventually the story reaches some sort of conclusion, depending on what the characters have done, and that particular game session is declared to be "over." In essence, role-playing games are excursions into interactive fiction, where a group of people contribute towards creating an interesting and engrossing story together. Whereas most games are simplistic in the sense that there are obvious winners and losers, RPGs reflect the complexity of real life and encourage cooperation among participants in a creative fashion. The GM functions more like a "referee" than an actual player, creating the story around the players as they decide what they want to do. In addition, the game never really "ends" (unless a character dies). Just like in real life, once characters have dealt with one situation, there are more that come up, and gameplay can continue indefinitely. There are many sorts of RPGs, mostly broken up by genre or setting (usually fantasy, medieval, science fiction, western, horror, gothic, or some combination thereof). Players can usually find a creative setting that interests them. Some games use random values (via dice, for example), modified by a character's abilities, to determine the outcomes of particular actions. So how does the Game Master know how to resolve a player's actions during play? Each RPG has its own rules system (called game mechanics) that steers the GM towards sensible resolutions to character actions. For example, if a game involves physical combat, the GM needs to know how to figure out when (1) a player accurately hits an opponent and (2) what specifically happens what that opponent is hit. The RPG's rules give the GM this framework. The game mechanics cover everything from character creation to action resolution, and also describe -- almost like physics -- how the environment works around the characters as they move through the story. So what specifically do you do with RPGs? Based on the previous section, people who play roleplaying games need to be provided with various materials: * Game mechanics: A set of consistent but flexible rules that can resolve anything that might happen in a story. * Character generation capability: The ability to create characters that seem real and mesh with the game mechanics. * Source material: Creative background material (similar to the setting of a novel -- with places, people, societies, and events) that Game Masters can use to tell and develop their stories. * Accessories: Things that make play move quicker, such as computer programs that help players create characters or randomly "roll up" general statistics for a society. Developing a role-playing game, then, is an act of creativity and an act of conceptual logic. The creativity might seem more obvious, since one is creating: * Societies, each with its own history, political structure, economy, sociology, customs, technology, religious beliefs, geography, demographics. * People to interact with the players' characters and cause events to occur, which then move along the adventures. * Stories that are interesting, challenging, and inspiring, that give the characters reasons to do the things they want to do. However, even the act of creation is controlled by methodical common sense. For example, all aspects of a society have to intermesh. Developing a realistic culture often demands a firm grasp of soft sciences such as history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economy. Also, game mechanics have to function predictably. It takes a lot of thought to develop either a new consistent way for the world to work (in essence, a new "physics") or to emulate the real world's physics in terms of the game. The same thought that creates a computer program where on-screen characters can manipulate items in a game goes into an RPG. So (at least on the game-design level) intensive work in RPGs expresses not only creativity but the capacity to work with systems and complex concepts, getting many items to function consistently as a coherent whole. We at ForEverWorld Books have designed our own extensive game mechanics for a fantasy RPG. We also develop cultures, which means we have to describe all the things listed above (anything about a culture that defines the culture, makes the culture more interesting to explore in, and that would contribute to possible scenarios and events). For example, we often build conflicts (whether political, economic, religious, or social) into a culture, which can then be used by a Game Master to help develop her own storylines. -------------------------------------------------- (c) 1998 by David M. McCandless Material to be used solely in regards to examining my credentials for employment.