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The players of roleplaying games collaborated in the creation of whole worlds, environments for their characters to adventure in, and were usually inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Roleplaying game publishers provided pre-made worlds for gamers to use, and new supplements for the most popular of these worlds were eagerly awaited by avid gamers. Eventually, gamers began experimenting with new genres, such as science fiction, post-apocalypse, superheroes, horror and even Westerns as the settings for the rpgs, as roleplaying games were called for short.

The hobby has grown over the years to encompass a wide variety of gaming methods, from hack-and-slash combat with detailed rules for combat resolution, to intensive storytelling with much broaderc rules designed to help move a story forward rather than slow it down with dice rolling. Different people prefer different methods.

"But how do you go about it?" you ask. "How do you create the character and know what's going on?" Well, in nearly every roleplaying game, what we call RPG for short, you create a fictional character who is placed in given situations appropriate for the roleplaying game. You play the role of that character, just like an actor does, but unlike acting, there is no script. Everything that you say and do is done in an ad-lib fashion according to the situation and the personality and background that you've established for the character. As a general rule, how much you actually perform of the character's actions is dependent on the game, personal preference, and the style of the person running the game (we'll call him or her the GamesMaster, or GM for short). Usually, you just describe actions, and only conversations are played out. In some gaming groups, however, the roleplaying is much more intensive and the GamesMaster is more of a referee, judging the results of your actions inside the framework of the story (or script) that he or she has created.

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