Role-playing is getting together with friends to write a story. It’s joining around a campfire or a dining room to spin tall tales. Role-playing is being creative and having fun.
Role-playing games have rules to help players play certain kinds of stories. Men & Supermen helps you play stories about superheroes.
In most role-playing games, one person is the referee, who can be thought of as the Editor of the story. The Editor will, with input from you describe a world—a setting. You and your friends, as Players, will take a character in this world, a protagonist, and you will guide your character through the story that you and your friends create.
Each player takes a different character, and each character interacts with the other characters. Role-playing is a lot like acting. You imagine what the Editor describes. You imagine your character’s response to the situation, and describe that response to the Editor and the other Players. They each do the same with their characters, and the story unfolds.
No Winners, No Losers
In most games—board games, card games, and gambling—there is a clear way to win and a clear way to lose, and winning is the goal of the game. In role-playing games—much like life itself—the very concepts of winning and losing do not have to exist. Your goal as a Player is to help create a story and to have fun. You may give your character other goals, but your character’s success at these goals has no bearing on your winning or losing the game. As the cliché goes, it’s not so much whether you win or lose, its how you play the game.
What is Role-Playing?: Adventures
That’s all well and good, you say, but what actually goes on? What do these characters do?
Characters have adventures, like the main characters in novels, comics, television shows, and movies. What these adventures consist of—whether it be chasing a supervillain, saving a world, or baking a pie—is up to you.
Playing Pitfalls
Cecil Adams (author of The Straight Dope) said with regards to role-playing games: “a lifetime of Parcheesi does not adequately prepare you for this.” There are no ‘moves’ in role-playing games. You make choices for your character as creatively as if you were writing a book.
People used to board games can find this difficult, and fall into two ‘rules-lawyer’ traps. Games have rules that explain what happens when, for example, your character is attacked by a dragon, or what happens when two space vessels race to the same destination. These rules are almost always there as guidelines. They describe what normally should happen, not what always must happen. The first rules-lawyer trap is insisting on following the rules, even when there’s an obvious discrepancy between how the Players and Editor want the game to proceed, and how a game rule says an event should turn out. The overall game should be more important than any specific rules.
Many times, games will not have a rule to cover an odd situation. The second rules-lawyer trap is believing that every situation must have its own rule. In this case, you waste time and interrupt the flow of the story by searching through the rule-book for rules that aren’t there.
It is easy to develop an adversarial relationship with your Editor. Why? Because you are playing the ‘hero’ and the Editor will be portraying all of the ‘villains’ that the hero meets. Players must remember that this is not a competition between the Players and the Editor. The goal is to have fun, creatively, together.
A related trap is to consider the Editor an omnipotent being in relation to the game, and to consider the game world to be the Editor’s world alone. The game must be for all the Players. The Editor is, however, the final arbiter of game disputes and questions. There’s no need to waste time arguing when you could be playing!
