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What is roleplaying?
If you ask a friend or someone you know who is already a roleplayer, you will probably be bombarded with a variety of explanations, each probably leaving you more bewildered than before you asked!
At its simplest, roleplaying games can best be described as "games of pretend with rules" which encourage you to use your imagination.
Without realising it, most people participate in some kind of roleplaying in their everyday lives - children when playing cops and robbers, actors when they are performing, and most adults during the course of a working day - most people behave differently at work or on the phone than they do normally.
When you go to the cinema, your imagination immerses you into the plot of the film - your stomach tightens during the scary moments and you empathise with some characters and not with others. The same principle is applied to roleplaying, but instead of having the images projected on screen for you, you must use your imagination to create the scene, the characters and the plot.
Roleplaing games (or RPGs) operate on a simple principle - the player is presented with a scenario and then asked what their next action will be. In most RPGS, dice will then be rolled to determine whether the player succeeded in completing that action. For example, the Games Master (GM) tells the player that someone is about to attack him. The player tells the GM that his character will try to run away before the attacker reaches him. The player then rolls a dice and hopes that the dice score will not exceed the level of his dexterity (which determines his agility and speed). If it does, then the "effort" is too much for the character and they fail to escape.