Fantasy role playing has been around for several decades now, and increases in popularity every year. Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted and GURPs are some of the well known examples of fantasy role playing. But just what is it?
Pretty much every gamer will give a different definition of fantasy role playing, but what it ultimately is, is a group of people having fun together while pretending to be a person from a fantasy world.
In fantasy role playing, each player creates a character with a history, abilities and personality. One player, known as the game master, or dungeon master, designs a world, comes up with a story, and builds any other characters needed for the story, including the bad guys.
Then, the group takes turns each describing what their characters are doing, or in the case of the game master, what is happening around the characters. Working together, they create an interactive story of what happens to the characters and how they affect the world they live in.
Fantasy role playing usually doesn’t have winners and losers. Normally all the players are working together to defeat the enemies that the game master creates. For the players, ‘winning’ is normally defeating the characters enemies and completing the story. For the game master ‘winning’ is normally successfully running a game that everyone enjoys, while making sure that the enemies are a challenge for the players to beat.
Sometimes, a rivalry develops between the players and the game master, with the game master deliberately trying to kill of the player’s characters, while the players do everything they can to derail the plot and finish the story early.
Fantasy role playing games are normally played with dice, or another random factor, to make the stories more realistic and allow for Murphy’s influence. So, players role dice to see if their character succeeds at a difficult task. Normally a high role means they succeed, a low role means that they fail, and a really low role means what ever they were trying blows up in their face – some times literally.
Most fantasy role playing games are set in a high fantasy world with magic, knights or paladins, dragons and other classic fantasy elements. Some are urban fantasies, and a few are games were characters can travel between worlds by magic, and so have access to any kind of world the game master can imagine.
One of the best parts about fantasy role playing games is they are never the same twice. The same people can gather once a week for a year, and each time tell create different characters, tell a different story, or play in a different world.
The appeal of fantasy role playing games is complex, the obvious escapism and living out a fantasy is part of it. So is the fun of working with friends to tell a story together, the challenge of ‘winning’ against monsters and wizards and other creatures, the creativity of designing characters and worlds . . .
Fantasy role playing games are ultimately a structured version of interactive storytelling that combines elements of children’s ‘let’s pretend games’ with the luck of board and dice games to create an endlessly unique way for people to spend time together.