What are Role Playing Games
An Introduction to RPGs for Parents, Friends and Spouses of Gamers
Dec 19, 2008
Role playing games, or RPGs, come in several varieties. The three most common types are table top RPGs, live action role playing (LARP) and video game RPGs.
In general though, every role playing game is a 'grown up' version of the children's 'let's pretend' games, like cops and robbers. However, since everyone remembers times when a game of cops and robbers devolved into 'You missed!' 'No I didn't!' 'Yes you did!' . . . well, rules had to be made. What the rules are depends on the type of role playing game.
Table Top
Table tops are the original role playing games. Dungeons & Dragons was probably the first role playing game. It was designed to combine classic war games with a Tolkien style fantasy world. A table top game is played sitting around a table with the players describing what they want to have happen.
Most table top role playing games use a 'dice system' to set the rules. In a dice system, when a player decides to do something (the cop tries to 'shoot' the robber for instance), the player rolls one or more dice to determine if what the player wants to happen, does happen (in many systems the higher the roll, the more likely to succeed.)
Understanding the dice systems tends to be confusing for people who are unfamiliar with RPGs. However, listening to players talk about their characters can be very confusing as well. Depending on the game, role playing terms about characters can include:
- Paladin - a holy warrior in D&D
- Changeling - A human stolen to the world of faerie who escapes and comes home in World of Darkness
- Cleric - a priest in D&D
- Splicer - a computer hacker in Shadowrun
- Attribute - generally things like strength or intelligence, normally rated on a scale such as 1 to 5 or 1 to 20
- Skill set - what things a character is skilled in (computer use, science, martial arts . . . )
- Hit points - a way to measure health, how many times a character can be hit before he or she dies
- And quite a bit more.
Basically, all of these terms have to do with how a character is designed - the first four terms are different types of characters from three different systems, the last three terms ways a character is described in numbers so that a dice system can work.
Table top RPGs include:
- Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) - fantasy
- World of Darkness (WoD)- urban fantasy and horror
- Gurps - multi dimensional anything goes
- Big Eyes Small Mouth (BESM) - anime
- Traveler - science fiction
- Paranoia - Orwellian humor
Live Action Role Play
A live action role play is basically a table top role play that has rewritten the rules so it can be acted out, rather then played sitting around a table.
Almost every major table top RPG has a LARP version, in addition to the variety of independent LARPs.
Video Game RPGs
Thanks to EverQuest and World of Warcraft, video game RPGs are very well known.
There are two basic kinds of video game RPGS:
- Single person - console and computer games such as the various Star Wars computer games.
- Multi user games - generally played over the internet, this genre includes EverQuest and World of Warcraft, as well as many others.
Whether single player or multi user, video game RPGs involve using a computer program to generate a character, and moving that character through quests, challenges and combats.
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