Role-playing game

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Role-playing games ask a deceptively simple question: what if you could be someone else entirely, and what if the choices you made actually mattered to the story? In 1974, a game called Dungeons and Dragons arrived in print, inspired by fantasy literature and the older hobby of wargaming. It was the first commercially available role-playing game, and the industry it sparked has never stopped growing. Today, people play out fictional lives at kitchen tables, in fields wearing foam armor, and inside massively multiplayer online worlds that never sleep. What holds all of these wildly different experiences together? And how did a tradition rooted in children's make-believe become one of the most elaborate storytelling forms humans have ever devised?

• 2. Story as Engine

  ›

  Authors and major publishers of tabletop role-playing games describe them as a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling. That word interactive is the key distinction. A viewer watching a television show is a passive observer. A player in a role-playing game makes choices that actively affect how the story unfolds. RPGs extend a much older tradition of small-group storytelling games, where a handful of friends work together to build a narrative in real time. The game does not require a strongly defined storyline to deliver that sense of narrative experience. Events, roles, and structure supply the feeling of a story even when no one has scripted what comes next. Rules and a consistent campaign setting help players maintain their suspension of disbelief, anchoring invented worlds in enough internal logic to feel real. The level of realism can range from the minimum needed to make a challenge feel credible all the way to detailed simulations of real-world processes.

• 3. The Tabletop Form

  ›

  Dungeons and Dragons was published in 1974, and its popularity brought an entire industry into existence, producing games with many different themes, rules, and styles of play. In the classic tabletop format, a small group gathers in person and a game master describes the world and its inhabitants. Other players state what their characters intend to do, and the game master describes the results. Some outcomes follow from the rules of the game system; others rest on the game master's judgment. Many independent role-playing games have experimented with this structure, distributing the responsibility for creating setting details and secondary characters among all the players rather than concentrating it in a single facilitator. Games that prioritize plot creation and player interaction over combat mechanics sometimes call themselves storytelling games, and they tend to reduce or remove dice and other randomizing elements. Tabletop games declined in popularity during the late 1990s when competition arrived from online multiplayer games, role-playing video games, and collectible card games. Between the mid-2010s and the early 2020s, however, the format experienced a resurgence driven by actual play web series and by online play through videoconferencing during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

• 4. Acting It Out

  ›

  Live action role-playing, known as LARP, moves closer to improvisational theatre than to anything happening around a table. Players physically act out their characters' actions rather than describing them, use real locations to stand in for imaginary settings, and often arrive in costume with props that match the fictional world. When conflicts arise, some live-action games resolve them symbolically through rock paper scissors or by comparing character attributes on paper. Others use physical combat with simulated weapons, including airsoft guns and foam replicas. LARPs range enormously in scale. Some involve only a handful of participants. Others draw several thousand players and run for several days. Because the player count tends to be larger than in tabletop play, and because participants may be spread across separate physical spaces, live-action games are usually managed in a more distributed way, with less emphasis on maintaining a tight, centrally controlled narrative.

• 5. Into the Digital World

  ›

  As early as 1974, the same year Dungeons and Dragons was published, unlicensed versions of it appeared on mainframe university systems under titles such as dnd and Dungeon. Those early computer experiments influenced the whole of electronic gaming and gave rise to the role-playing video game genre. Single-player role-playing video games form a loosely defined genre whose terminology, settings, and mechanics trace directly back to tabletop predecessors. The translation to a screen changes the experience, providing a visual world while shifting emphasis away from collaborative storytelling and toward statistical character development. Online multiplayer role-playing has its own distinct lineage, running from text-based multi-user dungeons, known as MUDs, through MUSHes and other MU variants, to the massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, that combine the persistent social worlds of MUDs with graphic interfaces. Most MMORPGs do not actively encourage in-character role-playing, and the majority of their players do not engage in it in that sense. A separate hybrid approach uses computers to assist in-person tabletop play, handling record-keeping and sometimes combat resolution while players retain control of character decisions.

• 6. The People in the Game

  ›

  Three categories of participant structure nearly every form of role-playing game. The game master, often abbreviated as GM, holds special duties: presenting the fictional setting, arbitrating what happens when characters act, and keeping the narrative moving. In tabletop and live-action formats, a human performs these functions in person. In video role-playing games, the game engine takes over most of what a GM does, though some multiplayer video games allow a participant to fill a GM role through a dedicated toolkit, subject to the limits of available technology. Player characters are the protagonists each participant controls; typically one character per player, though some games assign more. Non-player characters fill the rest of the world. Controlled by the game master, the game engine, or assistants, they serve as antagonists, bystanders, or allies, populating the fictional setting with everyone who is not a protagonist. Tabletop role-playing games have also found a place in therapy settings, where they help young people develop behavioral, social, and language skills. Beneficiaries commonly include those with neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia.