• Role-playing Games

  • Children's role-playing games
  • Family role-playing games
  • Plot-type game
  • Massive role-playing games
  • Role-playing and Psychology
  • Computer role-playing games
  • Table role playing

In role-play a central place is given to the characters involved in the game story. Participants at the time the game becomes a creature (not always men), whose character, motivation, habits and inclinations differ from their own. The difference can be striking - and in the course of the game through their actions and words of the players matches the characters, as if oblivious of his own personality (or rather, trying to take its effect on the background).

Moreover, in contrast to the theater and other actors formats all based on improvisation within the specified starting boundaries. This process is called "safety» (roleplaying), he gave a role-playing games of their title.

Depending on the system and the genre of characters can be quite different - the magician, dark priest, hunter, private investigator or, for example, a collector, an entomologist ... Nothing limits the imagination of the player character must only conform to a world in which the action takes place, game balance, framework plot.
There are various characters and character types, which were created long-term culture of literary fiction, fantasy, and film and adapted to the gaming system.

Thus, in the earlier tradition D & D, one of the first pen-and-word games, players were offered classes of characters: Mage, Priest, Warrior, etc., who subsequently became the reference. In their series in the very first editions of the rules were such classes as a halfling, elf, ranger - they were a well-known types of the trilogy of George RR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", and specifically - the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, Legolas the elf and the ranger Aragorn. Now it's funny to read, but for the time it was a step forward, because no such thing as a "character game" in a clear form did not exist, and it was one of the first attempts of classification.

Class division characters retained in most role-playing systems and moved into the world of computer role-playing games. However, in systems such as GURPS, was found by another approach - forming characters using skills they possess. This allowed us to create more individual and not dissimilar characters. Now to the characters role-playing approach, with far greater freedom from cliches and conventions than ever before - but it needed a long-term evolution of all components of role-playing game genre.