Well that’s an interesting question, it’s both an easy to answer question and an almost impossible to answer all at the same time. It’s easy to sum up what it is in general, but to say exactly what it is varies from person to person. It’s hanging out with friends and retreating into your-self. It’s one of those few things that people can know nothing about and hit the nail on the head with words, but completely misses the real meaning of it. I guess in a way you can call it an art form.
While it can be called (and I do call it this) an art form, you very rarely come out with anything but memories as a result. You don’t end up with a painting or a sculpture. Sure you will end up with some things written down, but what is written down is just a vague mathematical description of the character you have created. Maybe just maybe there may be some notes on how a character was played, that will give you something more than just a hypothetical list of traits and skills. Some would say well, it’s performance art then, but it’s more than that, in fact I would say forms of performance art are reality Role-Playing. While performance art is also usually done to entertain an audience, Role-Playing is very seldom done for an audience, usually it’s done for the enjoyment of the people doing it.
It also has elements of writing in it. In fact one of the people in the group has to be a writer in a very real way. The Game-Master (or GM or the Story-Teller or the Narrator and so on, different groups call them different things) is the creator and care taker of the setting in which the roles are being played. To be honest you would call them Writer-Directors if they were making movies, and the players are actors. The major difference is that while the GM controls the bit players and the villains and they act to his direction, the players do not fallow his script, in fact they can be said to work against them to achieve their goals. The GM has to rely on his ability to out act the actors and his luck a lot of the time.
Where as in a play the outcome is known from the beginning, the outcome of a Role-Playing game is never quite known. The GM and Players know what their goals are, but they have no set way to get there, or do they even know if it’s even possible to achieve their goals. To figure out the outcome the players use the ability to act as the Characters would and a system of rules for conflict determination. Those pieces of paper with hypothetical lists on them are how the Players know how the rules affect them. They are also how the players can tell what the characters has the possibility of doing.
Only the possibility of doing because within the rules is a system that allows random chance to affect the outcome of all things. Be it with mathematical models that are determined by the roll of the dice or any number of ways of determining a random result. This way there is always the chance that things won’t work out the way they look like they should, much like in the real world don’t you think? This means that even if the script starts out the same way every time no one ever knows how it will end.
It is a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Story” that writes itself as you go. It’s what computer games wish they could be what they are trying to be. Even the open ended MMORPG’s can’t do it. They just fall short; there is just no way for them to match the freedoms of Role-Playing with a group of friends. There you only have the options that someone somewhere allows you in the programming. In a real Role-Playing game your option are never ending because the GM and Players both are dynamic and do not have to fallow an exact path.
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