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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.


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(c) 1998 by David M. McCandless

Material to be used solely in regards to examining
my credentials for employment.