These things called roleplaying games, often referred to as RPGs–what are they really?
Put simply, RPGs are exercises in imagination. Basically, a group of people gets together and pretends to be a different group of people. Each person in the group except for one is called a player. The one person in the group that is not a player has the job of referee, though he’s seldom called that. In the popular Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game, the referee is called the Dungeon Master. In other games, the referee may be called the GameMaster, the StoryTeller, the Director, etc. (In the remainder of this FAQ, we’ll refer to the referee as the GM, which is short for GameMaster.) Each player in the group assumes the role of a fictitious person, and interacts with the rest of the gaming group as though she were that fictitious person. The fictitious person a player pretends to be is called a character. When playing a character, players often say things like, “I draw my longsword and attack the goblin.” What they really mean is, “Let’s pretend that my character draws her longsword and a
