Role Playing Games

 Role of the Dungeon Master

A Dungeon Master gets to wear many hats. As the architect of a campaign, the DM creates adventures by placing monsters, traps, and treasures for the other players' characters (the adventurers) to discover. As a storyteller, the DM helps the other players visualize what's happening around them, improvising when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected. As an actor, the DM plays the roles of the monsters and supporting characters, breathing life into them. And as a referee, the D...

 Know Your Players

ACTING Players who enjoy acting like getting into character and speaking in their characters' voices. Roleplayers at heart, they enjoy social interactions with NPCs, monsters, and their fellow party members. Engage players who like acting by ... giving them opportunities to develop their characters' personalities and backgrounds. allowing them to interact regularly with NPCs. adding roleplaying elements to combat encounters. incorporating elements from their characters' backgrounds into yo...

 Shock: Social Science Fiction

What happens when a mind is no longer tied to a body? What happens when those of greatest ability are enslaved by those of greatest power? What happens when Humanity is the new kid on the block? When minds are read like books and books are illegal? Shock: Social Science Fiction is a game, a set of rules, that you’re about to use with your friends to create some science fiction stories. You’ll create a world sitting around a table, or on a floor in a circle, and use these rules to reach agree...

 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...

 Art of Dungeon Mastery

Being a good Dungeon Master involves a lot more than knowing the rules. It calls for quick wit, theatrical flair, and a good sense of dramatic timing—among other things. Most of us can claim these attributes to some degree, but there's always room for improvement. Fortunately, skills like these can be learned and improved with practice. There are hundreds of tricks, shortcuts, and simple principles that can make you a better, more dramatic, and more creative game master.

 RPG as a World

ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a world. Of course, this world is not complete. It needs organizers and adventurers to order and explore it. It needs you1 A fantasy role playing game is an exercise in imagination and personal creativity. The organizer of the campaign, the Dungeon Master, must use the system to devise an individual and unique world. Into this world of weird monsters, strange peoples, multitudinous states, and fabulous treasures of precious items and powerful magic stride fe...

 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 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 the ...

 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 ...

 Cyberpunk RPG

The world of Cyberpunk is a combination of savage, sophisticated, modern and retrograde. Fashion-model beautiful techies rub shoulders with battle-armored road warriors, all of them making the scene in the hottest dance clubs, sleaziest bars and meanest streets this side of the Postholocaust. Each character in this world is playing a role--a face that the person projects to the outside world as the real thing. There are nine Roles in Cyberpunk: Rockerboys, Solos, Netrunners, Corporates, Techi...

 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 decidingvwhat their ...

 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...

 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.

 RPGs are Without Limitations

The greatest beauty of roleplaying is its complete lack of limitations. If you can imagine it—or if any of your friends can—you can do it, and magic, strange worlds, supernatural monsters, and legendary heroics are its stock in trade. In the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, all of these elements combine to weave a tapestry of fantasy gaming that is at once classic and new. Yet this lack of limitations also means that no single book can serve every possible variation. At 576 pages, the Pathfinder...

 Tabletop RPGs are Better than Video Game RPGs

You see, in this day of amazing technology, lightning fast communications and constant, exciting innovation, there is nothing that comes close to role-playing. That's because we utilize the ultimate computer, the one that can think for itself, imagine and dream - the human mind. No machine can match it. No machine can "imagine" and "create" fictional characters, places, and ideas that exist only in the mind of that individual and share it with others. No machine can read words and "see" them...

 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 situati...

 Vampire RPG Focus on Storytelling

Storytelling is the focus of this book. It is also thewhole point of the Vampire game. But what exactly is Storytelling?There are two trite answers to this question: Storytelling is what Storytellersdo, and Read this book and find out.. Both are true, but neitheris particularly helpful. Storytelling is what Storytellers do. In Vampire,the Storyteller creates and presents Stories in which the players participatethrough the control of their characters. The result is an interactive typeof story...

 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...

 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 supervillain is robbing the bank and trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains, etc.) and the players deciding what their ch...

 Judge (DM) as Multiple Roles

So, what is a Judge? A Judge is the stage-setter, the tale-teller, the mediator, and the narrator. The Judge fills in the background, describes what the player characters see, and operates the non-player characters, ranging from ultimate menaces to the universe to small-time crooks to innocent bystanders to other heroes and forces of the law. The Judge decides if a character's action is successful or if a villain escapes. The Judge provides the challenges for the heroes and the information th...

 To Be a Good DM 2nd Edition

Being a good Dungeon Master involves a lot more than knowing the rules. It calls for quick wit, theatrical flair, and a good sense of dramatic timing—among other things. Most of us can claim these attributes to some degree, but there's always room for improvement. Fortunately, skills like these can be learned and improved with practice. There are hundreds of tricks, shortcuts, and simple principles that can make you a better, more dramatic, and more creative game master.

 Elaboration on the RPG Definition

Instead of snakes and ladders, we'll put in hidden doors and secret passages. Don't roll a die to see how far you move; you can move as far as you want. Move down the corridor to the intersection. You can turn right, or left, or go straight ahead, or go back the way you came. Or, as long as you're here, you can look for a hidden door. If you find one, it will open into another stretch of corridor. That corridor might take you straight to the exit or lead you into a blind alley. The only way t...

 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...

 Collaborative Fractal Fictional History Building

In Microscope, you build an epic history as you play. Want to play a game that spans the entire Dune series, the Silmarillion, or the rise and fall of Rome in an afternoon? That’s Microscope. But you don’t play the history from start to finish, marching along in chronological order. Instead, you build your history from the outside in. You start off knowing the big picture, the grand scheme of what happens, then you dive in and explore what happened in between, the how and why that shaped eve...

 DM as Collaborator with Players

Most games have a winner and a loser, but the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game is fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do. The players all coope...

 Player Motivations for Role-Playing

Actor The actor likes to pretend to be her character. She emphasizes character development that has nothing to do with numbers and powers, trying to make her character seem to be a real person in the fantasy world. She enjoys interacting with the rest of the group, with characters and monsters in the game world, and with the fantasy world in general by speaking “in character” and describing her character’s actions in the first person. The actor values narrative game elements over mechanical...

 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 pl...

 AD&D DM's Guide 1st Edition

What follows herein is strictly for the eyes of you, the campaign referee. As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another. Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from "on high" as respects your game. Dictums are given for the sake of the game only, for if ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS is to survive and grow, it must have some degree of uniformity, a familiarity of method and procedure from campaign to campaign wi...

 Basic Dungeons and Dragons RPG Definition

This is a role-playing game. That means that you will be like an actor, imagining that you are someone else, and pretending to be that character. You won’t need a stage, though, and you won’t need costumes or scripts. You only need to imagine. This game doesn’t have a board, because you won’t need one. Besides, no board could have all the dungeons, dragons, monsters, and characters you will need! For now, while you are learning, you will play a role in your imagination. Later, when you play...