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If you know all about role-playing games, skip this section. On the other hand, this could be the first role-playing game you have ever tried. If so, welcome to the hobby and here is what you need to know to get started:
Playing a role-playing game is much like playing a card or board game: You meet with your friends and have a few hours of fun.
During the game, everyone takes on the role of a fictional character in a fictional world, much like in a movie or theatre play. Except that because it is a game, we call you “players”, and not actors.
Everyone except one person. One person takes on the role we call the “Game Master” or “GM” for short. He or she runs the rest of the world, plays all the minor characters, monsters, etc. and makes decisions where things are unclear, because he also acts as the adjudicator of the rules and the referee to applying them.
In a sense, using a movie as a metaphor, the GM is the director and the players are the heroes and stars.
The game rules determine how actions are resolved. Just like the rules of, say, chess determine how the pieces move and that both players take turns, so do the rules of a role-playing game tell which things do what and in which order and how any actions are resolved.
Unlike board or card games, however, role-playing games give you the freedom to do anything. The rules work best if they are applied and sometimes adapted. One of the responsibilities of the GM is to decide on-the-fly which rule to apply to the situation and how to change it, for example by giving a bonus or a disadvantage.
The rules are a flexible tool-set to resolve actions, and their purpose is to support the game and the story you are telling.
That is why there is the so-called "rule zero":
The game is meant to be fun. If the GM needs to alter or suspend a rule temporarily in order to resolve an action or situation to everyone’s satisfaction, he may do so.
Some groups also establish their own "house rules". They decide through experience and discussion that a certain rule needs to be changed or added in order to adapt the game to their style of playing.
That is perfectly fine. Bend the rules, adapt the rules or re-write the rules as you need. While a lot of play-testing and editing has gone into the rules as written here, they cannot cover every situation and every gaming groups’ style.
The game setting describes all the things and people that exist in the game and how they are related. The world and its people, what the technology is like, if magic exists and what it means. It describes the countries of the world and their rulers, or in a science fiction game, the planets of the galaxy. It describes humans and non-human races, monsters and aliens and everything else that provides the background and locations for the adventures about to be told.
For this particular game, the setting is that of Western Europe in the 5th or 6th century AD, just after the Fall of Rome. The setting is described in more details in its own chapter.
Characters are the central element of role-playing games. Where board games have their boards, role-playing games have their character sheets. This is a page (or several) where everyone has the details of their character written down.
Characters are what puts the "role" into "role-playing", because they are the roles that players choose for themselves in the game world.
We sometimes speak of player characters (or PC) as well as non-player characters (or NPC). Player characters are those who are played by players, obviously, while non-player characters are all the other people in the game world, who are played by the GM.
Player characters (and often at least the important NPCs) are also persistent. When you leave the gaming table, you take your character sheet with you and bring it again for the next session, because usually you will continue playing the same character. You can, of course, start a new one as well, but most role players play the same character for months or years.
The main difference to board and card games is that most of the game happens in your imagination, with everyone telling out loud what his or her character does, says or (sometimes) thinks and the GM describing the world around you and the actions and words of minor characters.
A role-playing game is a lot like telling a story together, where nobody knows what will happen and the story actually comes into existence during the telling. Not even the GM knows how the story will develop, because while he knows which dangers and challenges await the players, he does not know how they will react to them.
When the result of an action is in doubt, the dice are rolled to determine the outcome. This can be because some other character (a player character or an NPC) is acting in an opposed way, such as one character wanting to hit the other, who prefers to dodge. It can also be because someone attempts an action where the outcome is not guaranteed, such as jumping over a wall.
Player characters have numeric values describing their strengths and weaknesses, whether they are strong or smart, if they know how to ride a horse, or shoot a bow, or understand astronomy or magic. These numbers are used in conflict resolution to give characters who are good at something a better chance to succeed.
Typically, role-playing games use dice to resolve conflict and for many other purposes. Different games use different type of dice, sometimes just one and sometimes many. To make it easy to call out which dice to use, a shorthand has developed over time. Dice are called by the letter D and the number of sides they have, so “d6” refers to your common six-sided die while “d10” refers to the 10-sided dice used in many games.
The game rules then explain how many dice to roll and how to interpret the results. We will come to this later in this book.