So what is this roleplaying stuff, anyway?
My favorite answer has always been, "Roleplaying is 'let's pretend' with some rules." If you've ever raced around the back yard pretending you were Flash Gordon or Luke Skywalker, that was roleplaying. The rest of the hobby is just rules and suggestions.
The rules and suggestions make it easier for everybody to have a good time.
Most of the rules are for creating characters, and help ensure that everyone's dramatic role -- the character they play -- entertains them and keeps them involved. It would be pretty dull if everybody played Luke in a Star Wars game, and being the third Jawa on the left while your friends play Luke, Han and Leia would be no fun at all.
The rest of the rules are guidelines for the gamemaster. One thing that makes roleplaying games unusual is that there are several players and one gamemaster. The players each take the role of one character, in effect performing that part like an actor would. The game master does everything else, creating a story, portraying all the people (the "non-player characters" or supporting cast) and describing everything else.
The rules help the gamemaster decide what happens when the players' characters do things. If the player portraying Luke wants Luke to fire a blaster at an Imperial Stormtrooper, he tells the gamemaster. The gamemaster uses the rules to decide if the Stormtrooper gets hit and, if he survives, whether the Stormtrooper shoots back!
Anatomy of a roleplaying game
That's the theory of roleplaying. To see how it works in practice, let's look at a typical game session from a Star Trek game run in my bookstore.
This game follows the adventures of the U.S.S. Farragut, a starship mentioned in the original Star Trek series. Not counting the gamemaster, there are six players, each of whom has created a character who is a member of the Farragut's senior crew. There's a human captain, an Andorian navigator, even a Vulcan science officer.
They're all typical Star Trek characters, but everyone has their own quirks. The captain struggles to be a confident leader. The Vulcan was raised on Earth, and his easy display of emotions has the crew baffled. The navigator and the helmsman are dedicated surfers, constantly looking to catch a good wave -- in fact, they sometimes forget that a starship is not a surfboard.
About a week before the game, the gamemaster has an idea for a Star Trek story. He's been wanting to do an "aliens infest the ship" plot, but he needs a good twist for it. A book he's reading reminds him of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the rule of quantum mechanics that states that you can't observe an object without changing it.
Well, the gamemaster thinks, what if the Farragut were invaded by an alien creature that followed the rules of quantum mechanics? He likes the idea -- it's a bit offbeat, it's just pseudoscientific enough to be Star Trek and it suggests a good title: "Heisenberg's Demons". He starts outlining a plot based on the idea.
In the middle of it
The next Sunday, the players and gamemaster gather, and after they get some soda and munchies, the game begins. The only thing the players know about the story is the title, but soon they're right in the middle of it.
The gamemaster begins by describing how a subspace experiment aboard the Farragut has gone terribly wrong. A starfish-shaped creature the size of a large dog has crawled out of the experiment and is chewing on a power conduit. How will the crew stop it?
The headstrong security officer immediately tries his favorite solution: blasting the problem with his phaser. To his surprise, the creature isn't there when he shoots it. This is the Uncertainty Principle in action -- by observing the creature while aiming at it, the security officer has changed where it is. Phasers seem useless against this menace from beyond!
Vicarious shenanigans
The situation rapidly gets worse. More creatures blink into existence and spread throughout the starship. As the gamemaster ratchets up the tension, describing how the lights are failing and the computers are shorting out, the players make desperate suggestions to each other for stopping the creatures. Playing the roles of their characters, they observe the creatures, try out possible solutions and occasionally run for their lives.
After an hour of play, the players understand what they're up against. They've even figured out they're only dealing with one creature -- the seemingly hundreds of beasts infesting the ship are a quantum-mechanical illusion caused when it flickers between the locations where it's likely to be.
They're also having a lot of fun -- the mystery is exciting and they've had lots of chances to toss out Star Trek cliches and in-jokes as part of their improvised "dialogue." What they don't have is a way to stop the creature -- and now it's eating the warp engines!
Then one of the players has an idea. At the beginning of the session a routine sensor scan turned up a nearby black hole. The gravity well is so strong that it could skew the probable locations of the quantum starfish, trapping the creature within a tighter range of hypothetical positions. Maybe the Farragut crew (players) could use the black hole to shake it off the ship? It sounds kind of crazy, but it just might work!
Of course, there's one more problem. They can't travel to the black hole at warp speed, because the creature is eating the engines. It'll take 23 minutes to reach the black hole at full impulse power, and the engineer has calculated that the engines will explode in less than 15 minutes. The crew will have to pull off some miraculous feats of skill and daring if they want to escape certain doom . . .
That's roleplaying. There's dice and rules and munchies, but what makes it fun is the outrageous plans to keep the starship from blowing up or the Dark Lord from conquering all of Known Space. If you can come up with an crazy plan that just might work, you're a roleplayer -- and if you can do it with a witty quip, you're an expert!
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