Dispel Confusion: The Bystander’s Guide to Role-Playing Games

One of my readers pointed out to me that not everyone has played a role-playing game (or RPG, for short). So today we’re going to explore the basics of what RPG’s are and how they are played.

In a role-playing game, you take on the role of one of the protagonists in a story. You decide what they do, what they say, and how they react to what happens around them. The other players are doing the same with their characters. One person acts as referee, and takes the roles of all the antagonists and the minor characters in the story, rather than playing one of the protagonists. Together, you will create a narrative. It’s a little like improvisational theater, except you don’t actually act anything out. It’s generally done sitting around a table, and the action occurs in the player’s imaginations.

You’ve Done Role-Playing Before!

Did you ever play cops and robbers as a kid? Or did you host a tea party for your stuffed animals? If you have, then you have done role-playing. Did you ever have a part in a school play, or community theater? That’s certainly role-playing. Have you played a computer game like Assassin’s Creed, Pool of Radiance, or Call of Duty? Those are a form of RPG too! So you’re probably more familiar with role-playing than you think you are. Today, though, we’re specifically going to talk about tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. These games are played by a group of people interacting with one another, rather than a person interacting with the computer.

You’ve Got to Have Rules

Think back to those games of cops and robbers. One kid would fire their cap gun, and announce they shot another kid. That kid said “No you didn’t, you missed!” An argument ensued.

What the game of Cops and Robbers lacks are formal rules for determining whether actions succeed or fail. Did the shot hit the robber? Did it kill him, or was it just a scratch? How do you decide? An RPG has rules to figure out questions like these.

The General Structure of an RPG

Like any story, an RPG has a setting and characters. Like any game, it has players. But it also has the referee, and rules. Usually lots of rules. Unlike most games, “winning” is usually not well defined. The players are (usually) cooperating to achieve some goal, and the referee is (theoretically) neutral. Even if the players achieve the goal, it may only be a fleeting moment in a larger narrative. You see, the overall story is often played out over may individual sessions. The players get together on some sort of schedule and each time they pick back up where they left off the last session. Each time, the players resume the roles of the same characters as previously. Such a series of games is usually referred to as a campaign.

Setting

You can set an RPG just about anywhere. And someone probably already has. There are science fiction games, Westerns, pirate games, swords & sorcery games, 30’s film noir detective games, and occult investigation games set in any period from neolithic times to the near future. There are games set in the franchise universes of Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Middle Earth, and many others. If you can imagine an adventure story in that setting, you could make an RPG about it.

Rules

As I mentioned, RPG’s typically have a lot more rules than other types of games. That’s because the scope of things that could happen in an RPG is far broader than what could happen in a typical board game like Monopoly. The players in an RPG have far more freedom to act on their own ideas. In Monopoly you can’t try to burn down your rival’s hotels in the middle of the night. But in an RPG you could. Or you could start a smear campaign that their hotel is haunted, or has bedbugs. The rules of an RPG must give the referee a framework for figuring out whether just about any action you can imagine worked, or didn’t work, and what happened as a result.

I speak in generalities because there are many, many different sets of rules available. In part, this is because the rules tend to be tailored to a particular setting or genre. The rules for a swords & sorcery fantasy game like Dungeons & Dragons are concerned with magic, and fighting with archaic weapons, but not with machine guns or laser pistols. A science fiction game like Traveller, on the other hand, would be concerned with piloting spaceships and dueling with laser pistols, and it might have rules about archaic weapons, but it wouldn’t have any magic.

Characters

The characters in an RPG have all the same attributes of a character in any work of fiction: hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, and so forth. But it isn’t enough to know that Lord Macbeth is an angsty nobleman with a streak of ruthlessness, an ambitious wife and dreams of kingship. Now you need to know just how good he is at swordfighting, and just how likely he is to notice that McDuff’s forces are creeping toward his castle.

In an RPG, it’s important to have a system to define how one character stacks up against another in terms of attributes like strength, agility and intelligence, as well as how they rate at skills like fighting with swords, shooting guns, telling lies or deciphering ancient scrolls. Just as importantly, your rating scale has to encompass any character: it has to apply equally to Aunt May and to Spiderman.

The rating system is usually, though not always, numeric. The details vary depending on the rule system used, of course. In general, each character gets rated on physical attributes like strength and agility, and mental attributes like intelligence and willpower. In addition, each system rates your characters skill at tasks like parrying sword blows, picking locks, and swinging across chasms on a rope.

The Players

Each of the players controls at least one character in the story. Occasionally a person will play more than one, but it’s tough to do well, and most folks only play one. The player makes all the decisions for that character in the story. They decide what the character will do (or at least try), and what they’ll say. The player also takes care of keeping track of the player’s resources (health, cash, ammunition, etc.). The players generally work together. In this article, we’ll call the characters controlled by the players Player Characters, or PC’s for short.

The Referee

The role of referee has different names in different games: Dungeon Master, Game Master, Storyteller, Crypt Keeper, etc. But whatever the name, the job is pretty much the same from one system to another. In this article I’ll call them the DM.

Firstly, the DM has to have a solid understanding of the rules of their particular game. They don’t have to be able to quote chapter and verse, but they should at least be able to look up rules quickly and apply them correctly. The job of figuring out whether the hotels catch fire, or whether anyone believes the place is haunted, falls on the shoulders of the DM. They have to be able to come up with an answer.

Secondly, they help create the story by acting as the eyes and ears of the PC’s. The DM has to be able to relate the information the the players that their character’s senses would provide, along with the knowledge of the setting that their characters would have as residents therein.

Thirdly, they have to play the roles of all the people in the setting that the player’s characters must interact with. The players are free to have their characters interact with anyone at all, from beggar to King, and often do so in unexpected (by the DM, at least) ways. So the DM has to be ready to play the role of random barbers, stableboys, and tavern patrons at nearly any moment. All of these characters run by the DM are collectively called Non-Player Characters, or NPC’s for short.

So Now What?

Adventures

The characters need something to do. The referee provides this, in the form of an adventure. For most systems you can buy commercially published adventures (often called modules). Some referees like to write their own. The adventure contains the information the referee will need to know in order to facilitate play. This could include maps of the area in question, character sheets for important NPC’s in the story, and information about the locations the PC’s are likely to visit.

The adventure, of course, has some sort of objective. The sorts of objectives vary depending on the setting. Some games are more oriented toward objectives like “explore” or “loot” or “rescue”, while other games are more likely to seek to “investigate” or “eliminate”. A typical objective in a D&D game might be “rescue the Duke’s daughter from the clutches of the Bandit King” or “loot the Crypt of The Mad King”. In a science fiction game the objective might be “investigate a distress call” or “map a newly-discovered planet and catalog any life forms found on its surface”.

An adventure also needs a hook: some reason the PC’s are involved. There are as many of these as there are stories. Reasons can range from “we were given a document by a dying mentor” to “that guy made us mad the last session, let’s get him back” to “the Duke asked really nicely”.

Once the players have bought in to the scenario, the game is on. The players are free to decide how to proceed in achieving their objective. The PC’s may procure equipment, talk to anyone they choose, look things up in the library, or anything else they can think of. The DM plays any parts required, and relates what the characters would observe to the players. The DM also figures out what happens as a consequence of the actions taken by the PC’s.

All this continues until the PC’s meet the objective. Some adventures are concluded in a few hours of play, and some take many sessions to finish.

I hope that helped

Hopefully that helps you understand how RPG’s work. I know I still haven’t explained about the weird dice, but this post is already getting a bit long, so we’ll tackle that next time. Stay tuned!