What it is A role playing game is a mixture of many entertainment and gaming forms - it is a game of "let's pretend" where players take on the roles of adventuring heroes. It's like a combination of an interactive novel and improvisational theatre, with doses of strategic/tactical gaming. But there's no board, and the "game-play" actually takes place in your mind - the medium of play is your imagination. There are all sorts of role playing games in the market, covering a host of genres. Indeed, there are about 300 games available, but only a handful are noteworthy. The most popular RPGs are fantasy games, but science fiction is quite popular too. Indeed, one of the most popular genres is cyberpunk, and horror has always been a mainstay. There has been a very popular trend of late that merges two or more genres like SF, fantasy, horror and cyberpunk. Many companies are designing more. To play, you'll of course need an RPG - some come in the form of books, while others come as boxed sets, with the rules contained in booklet within. You'll also need a set of special polyhedral dice, pencils and paper, and players of course! The pencils and paper help when describing settings, recording changes and taking down notes, while the dice are used in random events - like determining whether your character manages to jump across the chasm or ends up looking like a rug. The dice used in RPGs are quite unusual, and have special terms for them. A D4 is a four-sided dice, while a D6 is the usual six-sided dice. There are D8s, D10s, D12s and even D20s! Yes, 20-sided dice. RPGs are played by two or more people (with five or six being best), with one of them acting as a Game Master (or GM), who not only interprets the rules, but actually designs the adventures the characters will be enjoying. The players, using the rules of the game they play, will create or generate the characters who will go on glorious adventures. This character, the player's alter ego in the game, is called a player character or PC. Through various scores and ratings, the player will know just how strong, intellegent, agile and charming his PC is, and what kind of skills he has. The types of characters you can play vary of course, depending on the genre and setting - in a fantasy game, you might play an elven mage or human rogue, while in a SF game, you might be an alien scientist! A GM is a combination of a referee, a movie director, an author, a master actor and a whole lot more. Don't worry - while certainly very challenging, it isn't as daunting as it sounds. Using the rules of the game, the GM may actually design an entire worldo or universe for his players to have adventures in. This all sounds very arcane and abstract, doesn't it? We'll provide some examples later, examples that will hopefully cast a more practical light on all this. What it isn't While we're on the topic of what RPGs are... They are certainly not computer games, although there are some computer games based on popular RPGs, and many computer games also make use of certain techniques present in RPGs. Yes, we know that if you pick up the average computer magazine, you'll see a lot of computer games advertised as "computer RPGs." Don't get confused - this is just a marketing ploy by computer companies to get more people to buy their games. Furthermore, there are RPGers out there who don't exploit the full potential of role playing games, and probably think they should be conducted like computer games. In a computer game, you do generate a PC who goes on adventures. But your PC here is just a collection of statistics and scores. In an RPG, he or she is an actual character, like any other character in a book. How deep the characterization of your PC will depend on you, of course. In fact, a computer game would be better thought of as a computerized gamebook, with many more options than the average gamebook.