Oxford’s English Dictionary defines role-playing as "an exercise in which participants act the part of another character, used in psychotherapy, language teaching, etc." While we’re at it (and since we’re dealing with the "etc."), this how the word "game is defined: "a form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck". Using these definitions we can extrapolate that a role-playing game (RPG) could be defined as "a form of play in which the participants act the part of another character, esp. one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck". All in all, not a bad start. But as anyone who has experienced life can tell you, a definition is not a full description.
First of all, allow me to assuage a few role-playing rumors:
1. RPG gamers are not worshipers of the devil. Or rather, being a RPG gamer does not intrinsically mean that one is a devil-worshipper. I have met gamers from many varied and different backgrounds. Any sort of person could be a gamer. I personally have gamed with Catholics, Jews, Agnostics, Wicca, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Taoists, Mormons, "Nihilists", and, yes, even a self-proclaimed "devil-worshipper" (though frankly, I think it was more a cry for help than a religious belief). In the Gentleman Adventurers’ Society, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, sexual preference, pet preference, appearance, favorite TV channel, least favorite pizza topping, placement of body hair, or any other sort of personal difference. We DO discriminate on the basis of personality, hygiene, and imagination. But if you of satisfactory amounts of the first two, we’ll do our best to foster the third.
2. RPG gamers are not all suburban, white geeks who live in their mother’s basement and have an inferiority complex. Only most of them are. Actually as stated above, gamers come from all walks of life. I will be the first to admit that a good number of us are guys who couldn’t get a date in high-school, but that is by no means the be-all, end-all of the ranks of RPG gamers. Gamers do have a tendency to be somewhat eclectic. It is my belief that this is not a symptom of gaming but rather gaming is a symptom of it. We have a tendency to be people who enjoy things that go against the grain in all things in our lives and RPG gaming is just another of these proclivities. In a future essay, I will discuss the term "geek" and my personal feelings on it. For now, we will leave it as a "bad" term.
3. Role-playing games do not encourage people to kill. Despite that moron from Florida, gamers tend to be a rather meek lot. In general, we don’t want to hurt anyone and those that do can usually get that particular desire out in a Rämm Stien mosh pit or other socially acceptable ways. Unfortunately, there are people in the world who are dangerous to other human beings. When placed in front of a court of law to answer for their crimes, these people will attempt to blame anything but themselves. I’m sure that there are more psychopaths that are, say, football fans than RPG gamers, nevertheless, it is easier to blame the hobby about which less is understood socially. What I am attempting to convey is this: there are bad people in the world whom do not want to accept responsibility for their actions. Role-Playing Games can sometimes be an easy scapegoat.
4. Not all RPG gamers hold the vast majority of societal mores in contempt. Though I tend to. Actually, I’m just being glib. The fact is that a significant percentage of gamers are people that, at one point or another, realized that attempting to fit in to society was futile for them. This situation is not exclusive to RPG gamers, of course. Role-playing games tend to be misunderstood, and thus, unaccepted by society. Gamers tend to be the same way.
5. Role-playing gamers will not eat your children. Being health-conscious, we realize that children tend to be loaded with cholesterol and sodium and they also tend to marinate terribly.
Now that you might be clearer on a few points (and more confused on a few others), I’ll give you a little bit of Role-Playing history. The story of Role-Playing Games actually begins with another type of gaming: Strategy Miniature Gaming. Strategy gaming has been around longer than almost any other form of games. Perhaps I’m being a bit glib. Still, one cannot deny that games such as chess, backgammon, othello, and even a number of card games certainly have a strategic element involved. These games have been around for hundreds of years, some much longer. Even without popular games such as these, strategy games are more prolific than many people realize.
As far back as the Middle ages, men have been recorded as playing war games with miniature figurines. These games served to keep the minds of military leaders sharp in times of peace. Even Napoleon was noted to have a fondness for such games. In the modern era, war games have been a popular activity for nearly all of the 20th Century. In the sixties and seventies, these miniature games, still mostly based of specific real-world eras and battles, gained in popularity among those seeking a new and different hobby. In the early seventies, a new type of game evolved from these strategy games. This was due to the desire of some people to not portray an entire army or even a unit of a few dozen men, but a single character. Part of this desire to portray a lone hero came from the increasing interest in "fantasy"-related stories.
The realm of high fantasy also has a long and distinguished history as well. Its origins can be found in Celtic and other mythologies but, for our concerns, the genre of fantasy story-telling originated with J.R.R. Tolkien and others of his era who adapted ancient mythologies into worlds populated by elves, dwarves, hobbits, goblins, and dragons. These authors envisioned lands where the heroes were forced to face odds far beyond the reckoning of the reader. And yet, by stories’ end, the monster that had caused the trouble would be vanquished and the hero privy to the accolades of his comrades.
For many years this genre gained in its following among those who could imagine such worlds. Some of these people were also fans of strategy gaming. Eventually, on collage campuses across the U.S., people began to combine the elements of strategy gaming and fantasy narrative. They used the rules that were already in place for the strategy games and played games where each player controlled an elf or a dwarf and battled orcs and goblins. As this hobby became more pronounced, the desire to see a game specifically centered on fantasy role-playing produced increased. The game that arrived to abate this desire was called Dungeons & Dragons®.
Although not the first role-playing game, D&D® was the first that had a widespread impact. It was produced by TSR® (Tactical Studies Rules) Inc. in 1973 and designed by Gary Gygax. The quality of the first D&D® product could best be described as humble. It was printed in cheap paper with a cover made from the same cheap paper but colored differently. The text was filled with typos and the artwork consisted of poorly drawn character studies that were barely decipherable. The game used types of dice that had yet to be made and so offered paper cutouts that could be folded into said dice. The whole thing came in a cheap, plastic bag sealed with scotch tape. If such a product were produced today, it would never sell as a serious attempt at a role-playing game. In 1973, however, there had been nothing like it ever available in so many different markets.
The fledging gaming community couldn’t buy it fast enough.
Dungeons & Dragons® changed the world for gamers, much in the way that Action Comics #1 changed the world for comic book enthusiasts. (Action Comics #1, produced in 1938, was the first appearance of Superman, and therefore, of superheroes, in general.) It showed that there were enough people playing these games, soon to be coined as role-playing games, to warrant a company taking a risk and producing a game specifically for it. D&D® was the first in a series of RPG games. These games were not confined to the fantasy setting. For the next few years, games of every conceivable genre were produced. From superhero to swashbuckler to space opera to spy to historical settings, games were produced to satiate any fan’s desired backdrop for adventures.
In the early years of role-playing games, the rules had a tendency to be either too simple (in other words, unable to handle any semi-unusual issue that might come up, for example: "Shouldn’t my sword melt in dragon’s breath) or too complicated (in other words, a set of complicated rules for every action a human might undergo in a lifetime, example: "Well the dragon’s breath is 1094º Fahrenheit and the melting point of Elven steel is 991º, however, the dragon is standing 35m from your position and with the temperature coefficient in the room…"). However, as more RPGs were released, the rules became more and more friendly.
In the late seventies, TSR produced a second fantasy game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. AD&D® took up where D&D® had left off. It introduced the concept of separate races (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.) and classes (fighters, wizards, thieves, etc.) to the D&D® milieu. Previously, an elven character was simply "elf". Now, a gamer could have an "elf fighter" or an "elf wizard". In addition to this, AD&D® provided realistic rules for dealing with nearly any situation that were easy to understand and use. TSR had practically defined the concept of role-playing games in the first place. Now they had redefined that concept.
AD&D™ became the most popular role-playing game ever. It transformed TSR from a mediocre, surviving publication company to a multimillion-dollar corporation and a publishing giant. TSR took the AD&D™ ball and ran with it. They designed a number of settings that their games could take place in, giving RPG gamers a chance to interact with an ongoing story and other gaming groups. They produced books that added to the rules given in the initial two rulebooks (the Player’s Handbook™ and the Dungeon Master’s Guide™). They also released a series of books that detailed the various monsters that the heroes gamers were playing could encounter. It was in the first of these books that TSR introduced the most dangerous beings that the Role-Playing Industry would ever face, demons and devils.
Society in general was ignorant, at this time, to what Role-Playing Games were all about. To most people it seemed that, in the early eighties, Dungeons & Dragons™ simply came from nowhere. Suddenly, this strange phenomenon was causing D&D™ books to sell out wherever they were sold. To a minority of the extremist religious right, this meant one thing, evil. Anything, in their eyes, that could cause such a stir must have some sinister undertones. In 1983, TSR gave these fanatics the ammo they needed to prove themselves right. The Monster Manual introduced a vast number of creatures that heroes could vanquish. Some of these were demonic entities that sought to destroy the souls of mortals. When "demons" and "devils" were found in the very same game that had detailed the "nine layers of Hell" and spoke of the "infinite Abyss", the religious right realized what D&D™ was… devil worship.
Immediately the media picked up on these religious zealots’ viewpoint. Soon, role-playing games were coming under fire for many societal evils. D&D and AD&D in particular were hit by these accusations of satanism and occultism. The Christian extremist groups were attempting to eliminate the hobby for good.
They, of course, failed.
Not unlike the crusade against rock & roll, in the mid-eighties, the crusade against role-playing games served only to show the public at large that there were many Christians who were so fanatical in their belief that they could possibly be dangerous. These devotees would target anything that gained popularity in society if they perceived any hint of depravity (meaning: anything that was not moral, in their unforgiving perception) about it. The public at large, although still not understanding role-playing games, ignored the protests of the "faithful" (read: close-minded). Still, not wanting to permanently wound a fledgling industry, TSR deleted the demons and devils from any further games.
Since that time, the growth of role-playing games has been steady. In 1991 a fledgling gaming company called White Wolf® released a game that upped the ante for all gaming companies. The game was called Vampire: The Masquerade™. The game revolved around vampires (usually portrayed simply as villains in role-playing games up to this point) who interacted with the modern-day world. It detailed the complicated society that these vampires dealt with and the intricate conspiracies that permeated that society. However, the dark, gothic-theme of the game was only the icing on the cake. Vampire introduced an entirely new factor into role-playing games. More than anything else, Vampire emphasized the aspect that many role-playing games had somewhat ignored… "role-playing".
It was stated throughout the rulebook many times that the theme of the game was about the interaction of characters rather than killing things and taking treasure form them. The rules were minimal and it was stated a number of times in the rulebook that any rule came second to the enjoyment of the players. As with D&D before it, Vampire was not the first to implement these innovations, White Wolf® simply had the most impact in their attempt. Vampire was followed up by four more games that emphasized the supernatural: Werewolf: The Apocalypse™, Mage: The Ascension™, Wraith: The Oblivion™, and Changeling: The Dreaming™. The White Wolf® games were met with varied appeal, however, they all had the common theme of the accentuation of playing a character and telling a story over extensive and detailed combat rules.
Vampire paralleled a social phenomenon that had been spawned from the various "punk" communities called the "goth movement". The goths came from among the disenchanted and outcasts. They determined that they were already different so there was no point in making the attempt. Goths wore black clothes and dark make-up and hung out at all hours of the night fretting about the futility of existence. They had been playing at being vampires long before there was ever a role-playing game that based around on it. Vampire was an instant hit with them. The game exemplified the way the goths had felt for a long time and gave them the ability to act on their darker feelings in the landscape of the imagination.
Oddly enough, long-time gamers didn’t take to Vampire immediately. As the game sold by the truckload to the goths, many of the older crew saw it as an affront to role-playing as they knew it. A game that places the character above all else? Even rules?
Heresy!
In retrospect, it seems odd that gamers and goths did not seek a middle ground on the subject. The two groups are very much like cousins in their "outcastness". Still, it wasn’t until White Wolf™ released their second game, Werewolf, that the classic gamers started to truly take notice. As time went on, the intricate storyline that White Wolf incorporated into their games, called "The World of Darkness", enraptured many gamers.
Now, I realize that there are many important points in gaming history that I have forgotten, but I wanted to simply give a brief history. In a future essay, I will detail the many other games that have helped to define role-playing gaming as it is today.
So What are these Games All About?
In truth, there simply isn’t one answer to that question. The fact is that there are nearly as many games as there are subjects for them to be about. Despite this, one can actually narrow the field down to simply one word.
Imagination.
(Can I possibly be any more cliché?)
The settings, battles, heroes, villains, allies, comic sidekicks, romantic interests, lost loves, victories, defeats, rewards, and everything else that is incorporated into the game is all found solely in the active imaginations of those individuals who are playing the game. The game transports these individuals, for a few hours each week, to a world where they can be someone else. They can battle the forces of darkness and save the girl or attack a space freighter carrying a king’s ransom worth of gold-plated latinum, or battle their arch-nemesis, Dr. Dastardly, as he, once again, high above the city as he, once again, tries to conquer the Earth. The gamer creates a story that he or she is transported into and can interact with, along with others, with the only boundry being the games’ rules.
The standard game set-up consists of two types of participants: the players and the gamemaster. A player’s only duty is to design a character (called a "Player Character" or "PC") that is interesting to himself and the other people playing the game. The player designs the personality of this character and maintains it in the various interaction within the game’s setting. The gamemaster is responsible for the setting and the all the characters the PC’s interact with (called "Non-Player Characters" or "NPCs"). The gamemaster (or "GM") has the audacious duty of having to keep the game interesting to all the players while maintaining a story that he himself finds enjoyable. GMs need to be quick-thinking as the determination of a player’s next move can be nearly impossible. However, the rewards of excelling as a GM can be anything from being able to have a game that is played consistantly for years to having a campaign that players will one day speak of to their grandchildren (probably moments before they are placed in a home… "Sure Grandpa, the orcs were all over the place.").
The Anatomy of a Gamer
So what kind of people play role-playing games? Well, as was briefly discussed above, many different kinds of people from every sort of walk of life. Still, most gamers tend to have a few things in common: a lack of the ability to conform to society at large, a desire to gain some respite from the real world without the use of recreational pharmaceuticals, a keen mind with the ability to grasp abstract concepts, and a quick and active imagination.
Some gamers tend to be misunderstood or simply lack the ability to express themselves in ways that are socially acceptable. RPGs allow these individuals the opportunity to express themselves in a imaginary setting and can sometimes even bring them out of their shell in the real world.
Many gamers are extremely creative, as one would guess by the very nature of Role-Playing Games. This creativity can represent itself in a number of ways. Many are aspiring writers or artists. A fair number look forward to the possibility of one day designing their own game. Others might be into computer programming and use that as an outlet for their creativity.
Gamers have a tendancy to form close-knit groups. The freindships that can result from playing Role-Playing Games can be lifelong. They also can be very protective towards those whom they see as threats to their community.
In Closing…
Well, I will admit that when I underwent this particular project, I fully intended to have an even more in-depth explanation. As it is, I have had less time than I would have liked to work on this essay. I apologize to those of you whom I have left with questions and will, as soon as I can, complete this work. If you would like to voice your queries to me, personally, feel free to e-mail me with them. And until I can return allow me to leave you with…