Introduction : What is a Role Playing Game ?

A Roleplaying Game is a game whose purpose is to gather a group of friends around a table to spend between 2 h and 24h to live adventures in an imaginary world (heroic-fantasye, graeco-roman, cyber-punk, futurist, space-opera ou science-fiction).

 The adventures are various and numerous, because the main purpose of a Roleplaying Game is to have a character evolve in a world rather different than ours. Possibilites are infinite such as wars, political, romance or  investigations.

The character played will be transposed in terms of rules by a sheet of paper generally called Character Sheet where are written the charactéristics, skills ans abilities of the character. A Rule System will frame all the action and the events that will occur during a game. The actions are often solved by a random dice roll.

One of the player will enliven he game  by describing the events, the location, the consequences of player's actions and the other characters (called Non-Players Characters), sometimes by acting as if he was them. This player is called the Game Master (sometimes the Dungeon Master).

What is not a Role Playing Game ?

Roleplaying Game is never linked to satanism. It doesn't underline the diabolic and evil personality of those who play. Players are rarely insane. They won't draw a pentaculum with chicken's blood, they don't sacrifice babies to the glory of a dark entity and brain washing has never be the purpose of Roleplaying Games. Media,  disconcerted by this phenomenon, dramatize all the accidents that occurs around Roleplaying Games. Sociology explains it : Players use their own language, a common humor (It's weird to see how, for instance, an american player, a french player and a japanese player will laugh about the same  gags despite the cultural barrier) and references which are hermetic. They've got a marginal culture which is international such as the deaf-mute language.

It's interesting to notice that a Roleplaying Game is a low-cost activity, because a sheet of paper, a pencil and a pair of dices are enough to spend hours of fun.

To conclude, Roleplaying Game is a stimulating activity! It enhance the reaction in emergency cases, it can increase the culture (historical Roleplaying Games) and it provide what men need at all: Freedom!