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The relationship between GM and the players:
Although RPGs encourage you to utilise the freedom of your imagination, some rules and common sense are necessary to enable everyone to enjoy playing. As a player, you will be immersed into a plot and storyline which has been conjured up by the GM. This involves a lot of work for the GM, who must adjudicate the rules, facilitate game play, mediate arguements, create plots and story outlines that will be entertaining and interesting, and create the detailed environment of the game world. A good GM is usually a mature, fair minded and knowledgable person who really enjoys doing all this work - its not surprising therefore that there always seems to be a glut of players but hardly any GMs!
Therefore the laws of supply and demand determine that if you want to be invited (and re-invited) to games, then not only must you convince the GM that you are enjoying the game, but also that you respect all the hard work they have put into creating this campaign. After all, why should the GM invite you to her game when she's got plenty of others vying to join in? There is nothing worse (for both the GM and other players) than a rude player who talks about their day at work, falls asleep, overtalks other players when its their turn, reads a book etc... whilst a game is in progress. So the goldern rule is: mutual respect and good manners between the GM and the players (at the outset of any game) usually avoids any build up of aggravation later!
However, the GMs do not do all the work - in order to participate in the game, players must have a working knowledge of that game system and its rules. Whilst the GM is creating the people, places and events of that gaming world, the players must create the ficticious personae they are going to be playing with. Most RPG systems have different rules for the creation of these persona (called "Player characters" or PCs). One game might rely on random dice rolls to determine a character's personality and abilities whilst another requires that a PC spend a predetermined amount of "points" to "buy" abilities and personality traits that would make them better than average. Some games combine both these techniques, and others require characters to be based on pre-created templates.
One thing which most of these methods have in common is that they leave the fundmental personality of the PC for the player to decide. The player may decide that his warrior character will act like a violent brute, but is secretly afraid of water. When inventing these personality traits, the player will be required to think of reasons why that PC has those particulary traits - as a child the warrior had fallen into a river and nearly drowned. Although this trait might never feature in the game, the player must bear it in mind when determining the PC's actions and motivations should the character ever be required to take a boat ride.
When the game is in progress, the GM will see that the "play" runs smoothly and the players will step in as actors acting out the part of their characters. The GM will narrate the setting and will play the parts of those fictional people not created by the players (called "NON-player characters" or NPCs). However, once the game has begun, all of the actual game play takes place in the imagination of the players and GM - no-one actually gets up and physically acts out the action taking place, but in some games this might happen at key moments if appropriate.