What is Role-Playing Game?

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Each player character will have traits (usually, these are a series of numbers) that tell you how good he or she is at doing a variety of things. For example, in a fantasy roleplaying game, a player's character might have Characteristics of Strength, Agility, Endurance, and Dexterity, and will have Skills such as 1-handed Sword, Lockpicking, and Spellcasting (to use a simplistic example). While there are a group of players, one of the number of the group, called the GamesMaster, DungeonMaster, Storyteller, Referee, or whatever, plays the part of the director. This person sets up the adventures, the encounters, and the rewards for the players, and plays all of the other people and/or creatures that they will meet during the course of the adventure - villains, princesses, alien, creatures, whatever - and keeps the game running smoonthly. It is this person who interprets the rules when the player characters take an action, and thus determines the results of actions taken by the player characters and the non-player characters (NPCs, for short).

"So why," some people ask, "is this RPG thing all about weird things like dragons, vampires, monsters and stuff?" The answer to that is remarkably simple - roleplaying games are firmly grounded in the fiction and the elements of the fantastic. Roleplaying games are very much inspired by fantasy, science fiction, or horror literature. Sometimes all three at the same time... I can't really say why this is true, but I suspect that it may have to do with the fact that roleplaying games are inherently an escapist pasttime. The players forget about themselves for a while and play a heroic (sometimes tragic) character with abilities far beyond their own. Many players play someone or something that they themselves are not... It's the idea of escaping from real life and indulging in a flight of fantasy. After all, if the player were playing a perfectly normal person, what would be the point? - that's very much along the lines of being a normal person in everyday life. While it's true that there are some roleplaying games that deal with such things, for example Boot Hill which sets characters up in the Wild West, or Call of Cthulhu, which is a horror roleplaying game in which the players play normal human beings caught up in very strange, and terrifying, events, for the most part roleplaying games involve characters who are special in some way, even if it means that they are adventuresome and heroic.