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A Fantasy Role-Playing Game, such as Dungeons and Dragons, is a game in which the people who are playing take on the roles or personae of fictional characters, and either create or follow along with stories. The players of DUngeons and Dragons and other Fantasy Role-Playing Games indicate the actions that their characters are taking based on any number of character specifications. The actions of the characters will either fail or they will succeed, based on a specific rules system. Dungeons and Dragons, like other fantasy role-playing games, have their own unique rules systems.

There are generally not losers or winners in a role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. This is the biggest difference between fantasy role-playing games and other games, such as card games or board games. Dungeons and Dragons, as well as other fantasy role-playing games, tend to be very social, and they tend to be based on collaboration more than they are on competition. Generally, one person in a fantasy role-playing game serves as the Game Master, who provides a grand narrative and rules arbitration, and the rest of the participants are players, taking on the role of a single character.

In many ways, a fantasy role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons is really a way of interactively telling a story. Because all of the participants are able to affect the story, in many ways Dungeons and Dragons is similar to improvisational theatre. The choices that the participants make, in other words, can change the course of the adventure.

Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy role-playing games build on some very basic games that people play. It is not uncommon for children to play "cops and robbers," or for adults to interact with each other in a role-playing manner; fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons provide a mechanical system of rules that can provide a certain level of sophistication for these games.

Fantasy role-playing games are appropriate for players of all ages. While there were certain misconceptions is decades past about an erronious link between fantasy role-playing games and the occult, today we understand those ideas to be completely and utterly false.

Learn more about this author, John W. Paulus.
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