Role-Playing Game Manifesto

These rules are written on paper, not etched in stone tablets. Rules are suggested guidelines, not required edicts. If the rules don't say you can't do something, you can. There are no official answers, only official opinions. When dice conflict with the story, the story always wins. Min/Maxing and Munchkinism aren't problems with the game; they're problems with the player. The game master has full discretionary power over the game. The game master always works with, not against, the p...

 RPG as Storytelling

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games o f make-believe. Like those games, D & D is driven by imagination. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents. [...] Unlike a game of make-believe, D&D gives structure to the stories, a way o f determining the consequences o f th...

 RPG as a Game of Imagination

It's a game of your imagination, where you get to tell storeis by taking on the roles of the main chractes-characters you create. It's a game that offers a multitude of choices-more choices than even the most sophisticated computer game, because the only limit to what you can do is what you can imagine. The story unfolds like a movie, except all of the action takes place in your imagination. There's no script to follow, other than a rough outline used by the Gamemaster (GM): you decide what ...

 RPG as Cooperative Storytelling

An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as, “You hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth manner, with the GM explaining the unfolding story (how a super-villain is robbing the bank and trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains, etc.) and the players decidingvw...

 RPG as Discovery

In a roleplaying game, the players take on the roles of people in a fictional world. Each player creates a character to portray, and together, the players create a story. In their imagination, the players experience the same challenges and rewards that their characters experience. To facilitate this, the rules of the game govern whether characters succeed or fail at what they try to do. This book sometimes refers to the player characters as PCs. In addition to the players who are the charact...