Fundamentals
When playing a tabletop roleplaying game, you will pretend to be someone else – a character. In a tabletop roleplaying game, there are players, each with their own character, and a Guide (also commonly called a GM), who takes on the role of the situation itself.
Before we get into details, just imagine that we’re sitting at a table, and I say to you “So, you’re a dragon, and you're up on a mountaintop, looking around. You've just seen a group of people making their way towards your lair, and they look like dragon hunters. What do you do?” - and you respond “Well, I guess I'm going to try and figure out if I can beat them in a straight fight, first, so I'm going to slip down closer and scout them out”. I think about it, and tell you a couple of possible ways to slip down the mountain to get closer, and you pick one, and I respond with more stuff; and we’re playing. I’m the Guide, and you’re the player. We have a fictional role (you're a dragon), and we’ve got a situation that works, one where you have a goal, some obstacles, stuff like that. So far, easy.
We might not agree on just how tough your character is, or how sneaky, and those matter, so I get you to describe your dragon a bit more, and we figure some way of resolving it so we don’t end up bickering. We’ll bias things in your favour if your dragon is good at sneaking and fighting, or against you if your dragon is bad at those things. In the interests of being fair, we’ll try to codify how we did it this time, and write it down, so that we can keep it in mind for the next time that character has to scout something out; it’s good to be consistent. And we’ll make up a few other rules to make it feel more like being a dragon.
...Those are the basics of a roleplaying game. If you have a published game system, the work of finding clear and consistent ways to create and resolve situations, and describe characters in ways that everyone can agree on, has been mostly done for you. Only mostly, because when you play in any roleplaying game, the group may find things that they want to add to, adjust, fine-tune, or change hugely - and that's fine! That is, to many, part of the fun. As you might expect, the situations tend to get a lot more complex - a simple situation like the dragon hunters won’t last us long unless there's a lot more to it than it appears, and building more involved ones is a bit of a trick, but one that can be managed easily enough. Having solid and understandable descriptions of ‘who the characters are’ and ‘what the world is like' get a great deal of attention in roleplaying games, and so do ways of making those things central to play. There are rewards and methods for keeping everyone interested and engaged in the game at hand that some games use. But all of that comes after the very basics of describing situation, action, response, continue.
Let's break down the parts that go into a game:
Basic practices cover who says what. The article you're reading is a start on describing basic practices – back & forth description, setting and skipping scenes, division between Guide and player authority, in-character dialogue, and movement in and out of rules.
The fictional setting describes where you are. Before players can have fictional characters, those people need somewhere to exist. This could be just about anything; “a spooky manor in modern times” is a setting; so is “the 'verse of the Firefly TV show” or “the ancient Assyrian empire”.
A premise for action describes what you do. Before creating characters, there should be a basic premise for action. This can be fairly constrained, such as having the characters as elite military officers in a special squad that will receive missions to carry out – or it can be almost entirely open, such as saying “You're all down-and-dirty in Wharf Town, you could all use some coin. The rest is up to you”. A published game might or might not include a premise.
A situation describes what's going on. If the premise is “you'll be sent out on missions”, then a situation is a mission. If the premise is being cash-hungry in Wharf town, the situation starts with “ways to get money”, but might extend into getting entangled in all kinds of town affairs, making that whole mess the situation. Where the premise points the characters at the setting material, that's where situation goes. In general, building situations is the province of a Guide.
A rules engine describes how you resolve actions, things like"I shoot! Do I hit? What next?”, as well as giving you a number of mechanisms for tracking values, turning fiction into easily-referenced formulas. These are the parts of the game most commonly called rules. Often, these are arranged in a systematic way, with numbers, dice, and on, creating the game part of a roleplaying game. “Light” versions of games are often nothing but engine.
Characters and character traits describe who you are. The point of all this is to provide a space, motives, and support for people pretending to be characters – the roleplaying part of a roleplaying game. Characters will have traits and ratings that describe them in the rules, will be built in light of the setting, situation, and premise, and brought to life by playing them.
For more about the basics, you can read the full version of Fundamentals of Tabletop Roleplaying, which you can get in a couple ways.
If you're willing to throw a buck or two in the tip jar, you can find it as a Pay What You Want file on DrivethruRPG; that's here.
If you're not up for that, you can also grab it straight off Google Drive: Click here.
Before we get into details, just imagine that we’re sitting at a table, and I say to you “So, you’re a dragon, and you're up on a mountaintop, looking around. You've just seen a group of people making their way towards your lair, and they look like dragon hunters. What do you do?” - and you respond “Well, I guess I'm going to try and figure out if I can beat them in a straight fight, first, so I'm going to slip down closer and scout them out”. I think about it, and tell you a couple of possible ways to slip down the mountain to get closer, and you pick one, and I respond with more stuff; and we’re playing. I’m the Guide, and you’re the player. We have a fictional role (you're a dragon), and we’ve got a situation that works, one where you have a goal, some obstacles, stuff like that. So far, easy.
We might not agree on just how tough your character is, or how sneaky, and those matter, so I get you to describe your dragon a bit more, and we figure some way of resolving it so we don’t end up bickering. We’ll bias things in your favour if your dragon is good at sneaking and fighting, or against you if your dragon is bad at those things. In the interests of being fair, we’ll try to codify how we did it this time, and write it down, so that we can keep it in mind for the next time that character has to scout something out; it’s good to be consistent. And we’ll make up a few other rules to make it feel more like being a dragon.
...Those are the basics of a roleplaying game. If you have a published game system, the work of finding clear and consistent ways to create and resolve situations, and describe characters in ways that everyone can agree on, has been mostly done for you. Only mostly, because when you play in any roleplaying game, the group may find things that they want to add to, adjust, fine-tune, or change hugely - and that's fine! That is, to many, part of the fun. As you might expect, the situations tend to get a lot more complex - a simple situation like the dragon hunters won’t last us long unless there's a lot more to it than it appears, and building more involved ones is a bit of a trick, but one that can be managed easily enough. Having solid and understandable descriptions of ‘who the characters are’ and ‘what the world is like' get a great deal of attention in roleplaying games, and so do ways of making those things central to play. There are rewards and methods for keeping everyone interested and engaged in the game at hand that some games use. But all of that comes after the very basics of describing situation, action, response, continue.
Let's break down the parts that go into a game:
Basic practices cover who says what. The article you're reading is a start on describing basic practices – back & forth description, setting and skipping scenes, division between Guide and player authority, in-character dialogue, and movement in and out of rules.
The fictional setting describes where you are. Before players can have fictional characters, those people need somewhere to exist. This could be just about anything; “a spooky manor in modern times” is a setting; so is “the 'verse of the Firefly TV show” or “the ancient Assyrian empire”.
A premise for action describes what you do. Before creating characters, there should be a basic premise for action. This can be fairly constrained, such as having the characters as elite military officers in a special squad that will receive missions to carry out – or it can be almost entirely open, such as saying “You're all down-and-dirty in Wharf Town, you could all use some coin. The rest is up to you”. A published game might or might not include a premise.
A situation describes what's going on. If the premise is “you'll be sent out on missions”, then a situation is a mission. If the premise is being cash-hungry in Wharf town, the situation starts with “ways to get money”, but might extend into getting entangled in all kinds of town affairs, making that whole mess the situation. Where the premise points the characters at the setting material, that's where situation goes. In general, building situations is the province of a Guide.
A rules engine describes how you resolve actions, things like"I shoot! Do I hit? What next?”, as well as giving you a number of mechanisms for tracking values, turning fiction into easily-referenced formulas. These are the parts of the game most commonly called rules. Often, these are arranged in a systematic way, with numbers, dice, and on, creating the game part of a roleplaying game. “Light” versions of games are often nothing but engine.
Characters and character traits describe who you are. The point of all this is to provide a space, motives, and support for people pretending to be characters – the roleplaying part of a roleplaying game. Characters will have traits and ratings that describe them in the rules, will be built in light of the setting, situation, and premise, and brought to life by playing them.
For more about the basics, you can read the full version of Fundamentals of Tabletop Roleplaying, which you can get in a couple ways.
If you're willing to throw a buck or two in the tip jar, you can find it as a Pay What You Want file on DrivethruRPG; that's here.
If you're not up for that, you can also grab it straight off Google Drive: Click here.