FRPGs
Fantasy rôle-playing games and things of a similar ilk

In rôle-playing games (or RPGs) players, in a group of between three and seven, take on the roles of imaginary characters in some imaginary world.

One player – varously known as the Dungeonmaster (DM), Gamemaster (GM), Referee, and so on – takes on the task of describing and controlling the imaginary world, while the others – the Players (with a capital “P”) – describe and control individual characters. Very few RPGs are competitive: the idea is not to beat the other players, not even the one in charge of the world. The characters may compete with one another, but the players normally co-operate to make sure that everyone has a good time. (As one of my – then – ten-year-old sons said, the idea of any game is to have fun!)

In a “traditional” RPG, a group of players sit together around a dining table (or lounge in a living room, or wherever) and play the game. The players may have nothing but a sheet of paper, pencils, and perhaps some dice to play, or they may choose to use props such as costumes, miniatures (small three-dimensional representations of each character or monster), maps, plastic terrain, and so forth.

Live-action role-playing games (LARPs – no “G”!) are more “theatrical”: players dress up like their characters and act out scenes, moving around a designated area, building or destroying coalitions with each other, sometimes “casting spells” or “engaging in combat”. In fact, most LARPs don't allow people to really hit each other and tend to emphasize conversation and politics, precisely because combat is too dangerous to handle!

The rules vary greatly from one RPG to another, as does the imaginary world in which the characters live. The game’s imaginary world might be taken from the realms of science fiction (e.g., GDW’s Traveller), Hong Kong martial-arts action movies (e.g., Atlas Games’ Feng Shui), chanbara (e.g., Gold Rush Games’ Sengoku), heroic fantasy (e.g., TSR’s seminal Dungeons and Dragons, now published by Wizards of the Coast, or any other genre of fiction or motion pictures.

An RPG with a fantasy setting is – strangely enough! – called a fantasy rôle-playing game (FRPG).

I was first exposed to FRPGs while I was a first-year undergraduate at the University of Durham. Within our gaming circle we played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, based on the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and – best of all! – FGU’s Bushido: Legends of Nippon.

After university, I continued to play Bushido and also used the combat and magic rules for a sword-and-sorcery campaign in my own imaginary world of Aifa, which had a more-traditional medieval European flavour, borrowing somewhat from Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (WFRP, until recently published by Hogshead Publishing). (By the way, Graeme Davis, one of the original WFRP designers, was one of my Durham gaming circle! Graeme has worked since university as a writer and games designer with Games Workshop, VR•1, and others.)

Most recently, I’ve been developing a campaign based on Ars Magica , with some elements from White Wolf’s Dark Ages Vampire (formerly Vampire: The Dark Ages), Dark Ages Werewolf, etc.