Role-Playing

So what is role-playing? That question gets kinda boring after the first couple of hundred times, so instead of answering it I'm just going to stick in someone elses answer and rant a bit. To start with, role-playing isn't about bunches of 14 year old boys equipped with +5 Vorpal Blades whaling on some poor defenceless Orcs. Ok, so not all 14 year olds play like this, but it seems that every time I talk to anyone about role-playing, either they used to do this when they were young or knew people who did, and what a surprise, they thought it was incredibly boring and pointless.

The fact is, most people start off with the equivalent of kicking a tin can around in the street, and never get to experience the joys of a well thought out Sunday morning game, followed by retiring to the pub afterwards.

Fortunately, that has started to change in recent years with the launch of games aimed at an adult audience (and I don't mean adult as in adult Web pages :-) These games concentrate on providing a detailed background for role-playing, which lets you define how you want to play your characters, rather than just saying 'Orcs are bad. You are a fighter. You kill Orcs.'

Some of the best of these games have been released by a company called White-Wolf and are set in a distorted version of the present day world, called the World of Darkness. I'm not going to bother to go into detail about the World of Darkness setting - other people have done it far better than I ever could:

Hoyle's White Wolf Page Paul Strack's World of Darkness Page B.J. Zanzibar's World of Darkness Anders Mage Page

There's also a newsgroup for the storyteller systems: rec.games.frp.storyteller, which also includes various in-character threads where people post articles in their role-playing persona. Visit The Wolves Glen Pub Page for more info on one of these threads.

A few general role-playing links:

Role-Playing Dictionary Role-Playing Quotations Role-Playing FTP site list