by Clyde Starr

Created on: April 06, 2009   Last Updated: April 07, 2009

Ahh, role playing games. Games such as D&D(Dungeons and Dragons) are the ultimate escapism hobby. Unlike your standard games, where there are winners and losers, in D&D, it's all about getting to be someone else for a little while, getting to put the problems and stresses of the world behind you for a few hours of pure fantasy enjoyment

"No Winners? No Losers?" someone asks? "How can you have a game where nobody wins?" cries another. It's simple I tell you. D&D is all about surviving to the next great challenge, while having fun doing it. Even when you die in the game, you don't lose, you can come in again with another character. The real winning of the game is the enjoyment that is had by those you are playing with, and of course, your own enjoyment.

First, I think a little background on the game itself is needed, nothing too extensive, but a little overview of how the game is played, for the uninitiated. When you play D&D(and many other tabletop roleplaying games, mind you) a group of players get together and take on the role of fantasy characters(Player Characters, or PCs for short). One player is the Dungeon Master (DM for short). Each PC is written up according to a set of rules manuals. They represent Noble Paladins, Crafty Rogues, Fierce Fighters and Barbarians, Nature savvy Druids and Rangers, Mysterious Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks, Master Tacticians like the Warlord, a wide gamut of roles. The DM plays every character that the PCs interact with, be it a shop keep or city guardsman (Non-Player Character, or NPC for short) or actually an opponent or monster in the wild.

As you play, there are various challenges, like whose sword hits who, and who successfully dodges what attack, and how badly hurt someone gets. These things are resolved in the game using your standard random number generator, Dice! The D&D game features several basic dice, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d% are the standard dice, where the number after the 'd' is the number of sides to the dice, and the number before the 'd' showing how many of the dice to roll(d% are 100 possible combinations, usually rolled as 2d10, with one representing the 1's place, and one representing the 10's place, 2 10s is 100).

In the game, you are righting a new high fantasy story. You interact together and with the various DM supplied elements of the game, which also include weather, terrain conditions, and even Deity intervention. Surviving the encounters in a session is one way of winning

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