Explanation of Roleplaying

When I mention that I'm interested in role-playing, a lot of people wonder what that really means. They have some idea of childrens games or sexual innuendo, but its actually its actually a form of Storytelling.

A group of friends get together and collectively tell a story, creating the characters, deciding what happens to them, and speaking as the character would speak. Essentially, like acting.

Storytelling

Imagine taking part in a film with no limits to the time and budget - a cast of thousands, the entire special-effects resources of "Industrial Light and Magic" and sets and makeup only limited by your imagination. All these things can power the story you and a group of friends have decided to tell each other.

Like a radio play: its all created in your minds' eye.

The old comparison is: remember when you were a kid? We all played cops and robbers, earthmen and space aliens - all those games where we made up a character of sorts, and played it out with our friends. That was your first experience of 'role-playing'. It is acting out a story in an imagined environment, whether that is in the real world, or somewhere else.

Storytelling is just an adult, more vivid version of this.

Games

Today's Roleplaying Games (or RPGs) had their origins in the first and most successful of them all - Dungeons and Dragons.

In the most basic form of D&D, each player took on the role of a different character based on an archetype - a priest, a warrior, a magician, a thief etc.

The Storyteller

The game is run by one player, who is called a GamesMaster (GM) or Storyteller.

He creates a setting for the story, and a cast of other characters that the other Players will interact with. The Storyteller's task is to describe aloud the characters' surroundings, events that happen, and to play the part of any Non-Player Characters (or NPCs) which the player-characters may meet.

Characters

Each Player takes on the role of the character they've created. Players listen to the situation the Storyteller describes, and describe out loud what their character will do or say in the current situation.

It's a lot like acting, except that we only describe verbally what characters do. I find this is a lot more involving and convincing that trying to act it out physically.

Rules - how does it work?

The most confusing and initially intimidating thing about most roleplaying games are the "Rules". Basically whenever a character makes a difficult action, such as jumping across a gap, starting a fight or trying to charm another character, you have to somehow decide the outcome.

Each player has a piece of paper called a "character sheet", on which are recorded lists of attributes which describe things about the character: how strong they are, how good looking, how charming, what skills they have and how good they are at them.

For most tasks, in most types of game, there is a Random element. Outcomes are decided by rolling dice. How well the character does depends on the level of the character's physical and personal skills.

For example, in the White Wolf system that I most use, a characters attributes are rated out of 5. For example, a character with a strength of 3 is just above average, and gets 3 dice to roll.

There are many different systems and many different sets of rules, but this is basically how it works.

Different types of game

Today there are a vast array of different worlds and scenarios in which games are played: become an X-files-like investigator in the classic "Call of Cthulu" - based on H P Lovecraft's 1920s horror stories; future science-fiction games like those set in the "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" universes; cyberpunk alternate realities like "ShadowRun"; funny games like "Paranoia" - set in a hysterical post-Apocalyptic world, or Marvel Superheroes (which can be very funny); and then, (cue drum-roll), there is the "World of Darkness" - White Wolf's series of adult gothic-horror games - one of which is Vampire: the Masquerade.

Vampire can be a deep and emotionally intense experience when played well. As the game-book blurb says, it is "a story-telling game of personal horror", in which there is much more emphasis on telling a good story, rather than winning or losing. Each character, if played well, is not just a set of numbers who has been conjured up for a particular game session. He or she should be a real, rounded character, as in a good film or book - he or she has a personal history, ways of speaking, thinking, acting.

The kind of roleplaying experience I enjoy contains characters who arereal and believable people, rather than two-dimensional cartoons.

Give your character parents, family, friends, emotions, motivations, hopes, fears, strengths and weaknesses. A really good Vampire character (who is not necessarily undead, even), should not just be an emotionless killing machine - it just doesn't provide an interesting story. Well... not necessarily. A purely evil character like this can provide an interesting contrast to other, more human characters, but they're boring from a Storytelling perspective.

Basically, the reason I roleplay is to explore emotions, to develop real characters and a depth of feeling for whether your character succeeds or fails. For me, thats what its really all about.