by Jessica Burde

Created on: March 10, 2009

Commercially available table top role-playing games have been around for over 30 years, since Gary Gynax went public with his now famous Dungeons and Dragons. D&D was closely related to the war games that were popular at the time, and are still played today (my brother tried to get me involved in one recreating the Battle of the Bulge once. I was rather soundly defeated.)

What are Role-Playing Games?

A simple definition of table top role-playing games is that they are games of make-believe, where each participant makes up an imaginary character, and pretends to be that character while interacting with the other player's characters and the world, which is designed and run by a Game Master (sort of a referee on steroids).

Most of these games tend to be adventures of some sort - action, mystery, questing, and threats of total world annihilation are common. After all, most people don't see the point in making up a pretend character who goes to work, argues with her boss about a raise, comes home, watches TV (or makes dinner for the kids) and goes about daily life. We don't need to imagine daily life, we live it. Most role-playing games focus on the character that do things we can only dream about (which is also why most role-playing games are either fantasy, or sci-fi).

How are Role-Playing Games Played?

So, Friday night arrives, a gaming group gathers, and . . . . what? Well, first thing is to create the characters everyone is going to play. This is generally called character creation, or character generation - sometimes shortened to character-gen. Every game has it's own rules for character gen, but in general there are two parts - mechanics, which is determining what skills the character has, how smart or strong they are, and generally what they are able to do; and personality, figuring out who the character is, what he or she likes, etc.

Once all the players have built a character, which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours, the game can begin. The Game Master starts the game by describing the world, and the scene - the classic beginning, which has been used so often it's become a joke, is 'So, you're all hanging out at a local tavern . . . '

The players then take turns describing what their characters are doing, 'I walk in and order a beer,' 'I see him walk in and get up to leave,' 'I ignore these two idiots and continue studying.'

After a while, when the players have settled in and their characters have had a chance to chit chat a bit, the Game Master

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