What is roleplaying?

by James Wyatt

Since I am now writing for roleplaying games as an actual source of income, I find myself increasingly in the position of having to explain roleplaying games to people with no exposure to or understanding of the hobby. My parents have hosted games at their house often enough to have some idea what I'm doing, but my in-laws have less exposure, and when they see my published writing they're inclined simply to raise an eyebrow at the scantily-clad woman on the magazine cover without any understanding of the contents. So I've been working on explaining roleplaying by starting from scratch.

Roleplaying is, first and foremost, about games. (We are not talking about the therapeutic or educational technique of roleplaying, but about roleplaying games.) Let's make sure we've got that straight, both inside and outside the hobby. That's what we're doing: playing games. Entertainment is the point and the goal; we do this to have fun. Wizards of the Coast— the company that makes Magic: The Gathering and now owns TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons—has expressed the goal of making gaming as popular a form of entertainment as the movies. It's certainly a much more cerebral hobby than movies, but it's still just a hobby. So that's clear: we're talking about games.

OK, so what do you do in a roleplaying game? You take on the role (hence the name) of an imaginary character, and control the actions of that character in response to events in the imaginary world around. Improvisational theater or collaborative storytelling are ways to think of it... except that the improvisation is guided by rules. If your character in the game comes across a yawning chasm in the ground while running from pursuing bad guys, you might think of a similar scene in a book or a movie and declare that your character is going to leap heroically across the chasm. In a story, the author could just decide whether the hero makes the leap or not, based primarily on what best advances the story. In a roleplaying game, there are rules in place to determine—usually with the aid of a random die roll—whether the character is going to make it across or not.

Each player in a roleplaying game, generally, takes on the role of a single character. The game is not competitive—the characters are supposed to all work together in order to accomplish their goal, whether it's rescuing a captive prince or destroying the evil alien starship. If they succeed, all the characters share in the rewards, and if they fail, they all suffer the consequences.

One player, generally called the Gamemaster (or Dungeon Master, or some other title specific to the game being played), has a special role to play. The Gamemaster (GM for short) crafts the adventure the other players will join in, determining not exactly what will happen, but the framework of events, the important antagonists and other supporting characters, and the setting. I think of the GM as sort of like a novelist—except that the characters in the "novel" have free will, meaning that they can steer the course of the adventure in unexpected directions. (See my "God as Dungeon Master" sermon for more on this idea.) The GM controls the actions of all the characters in the story who are not the heroes (controlled by the other players)—from the evil mastermind whose plans the heroes must thwart to the humble innkeeper who gives them a place to sleep at night. Despite the fact that the GM controls characters who are antagonists to the heroes, the GM is still not in competition with the players. Everyone shares the same goal: to tell a good story.

A roleplaying game has no board, no pieces that you move around. It's all verbal—each player describes the actions that his or her character will perform. Exactly how players do this is a matter of personal style. Some players remain fairly detached from their characters: "My character is going to try to open the door." Others speak in the first person: "I'll walk over and see if anything is under the bed." Still others get a little more dramatic, and may accompany their words with gestures, accents, sometimes even getting up and moving around. But in general the "action" of the game is confined to the table and the imaginations of all the players. There is lots of paper involved—pages with the key information about each character, notes to remind the players of what they've done and clues they've uncovered, and the GM's copious information about the adventure. Not to mention the rulebooks, which can take up a lot of shelf space.

I think this will serve as a general overview of what roleplaying is all about. If you've read this far and have more questions, please feel free to e-mail me, and I'll do my best to explain things better.