RPG as Collaborative Creation

Playing D&D is an exercise in collaborative creation. You and your friends create epic stories filled with tension and memorable drama. You create silly in-jokes that make you laugh years later. The dice will be cruel to you, but you will soldier on. Your collective creativity will build stories that you will tell again and again, ranging from the utterly absurd to the stuff o f legend.

 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 Experience

A role-playing game is a cooperative experience between multiple participants. At its simplest, it can be described as an organized form of group make-believe, with a set of rules and procedures to keep things consistent and fair. The goal is not to win - there are no real "winners" in a role-playing game - but simply to have a good time.

 RPG as Theater, Storytelling, and Game

A roleplaying game is part improvisational theater, part storytelling, and part game. It is played by a gamemaster who runs the game and a group of players who pretend to be characters. These characters are created by the players, given a history and personality, and then further defined by a set of statistics that represent the character’s skills and attributes as developed in the character creation process (see Creating a Shadowrunner, p. 80). The gamemaster presents the setting and situa...

 RPG as Sophisticated Make-Believe

A roleplaying game is, in may ways, a sophisticated version of the childhood game of make-believe. If you ever played cops-and-robbers (or cowboys and indians, or army), you remember the arguments about who shot whom, or how quickly you could reach cover before you got blasted by some bad guy, or how much damage a hand grenade did to a bunker, and so on. One of the main differences between roleplaying games and childhood games is that hte rules answer all these questions, and more: The rules...

 4th Edition Player's Handbook Definition of RPG

A roleplaying game is a storytelling game that has elements of the games of make-believe that many of us played as children. However, a roleplaying game such as D&D provides form and structure, with robust gameplay and endless possibilities. D&D is a fantasy-adventure game. You create a character, team up with other characters (your friends), explore a world, and battle monsters. While the D&D game uses dice and miniatures, the action takes place in your imagination. There, you h...

 RPG as Group Exercise

A roleplaying game (or RPG, for short) is part noémprovisational theater, part storytelling, and part game. A single person (the gamemaster) runs the game for a group of players that pretend to be characters in a fictitious world. The world could be a mystery game set in the 1920s that takes you adventuring around the globe, a fantasy realm inhabited by dragons and trolls and sword-wielding barbarians, or a science fiction setting with aliens and spaceships and world-crushing weaponry. The p...