Games can be varied: we know board, card, word and picture games. Role-playing games cannot be included in any of these categories - it is a bit difficult to determine what they really are. The comparison doesn’t help either, as there’s nothing to compare it to without letting our imagination run beyond its normal, mundane limits. However, the essence of role-playing is precisely the free soaring of the imagination: Suppose we are playing an ordinary board game. The goal is to get from the first cube on the board to the last before anyone else does it in front of us. The road was hampered by traps and passages from which we could slip back to the starting point or just jump big towards the destination. So far, this is very simple and standard. Let's change a few things! Put an intricate maze in place of the uninteresting flat board on which the road winds. We are at the entrance to this. We know there has to be an exit somewhere as well, but not where it is located! Don’t use dice to decide how much we can go - let’s go as far as we want! Let's make the game even more exciting! Wander through the maze of ugly monsters. That’s why you get weapons - swords, bows, daggers and shields - to defend yourself in the event of an attack on you. Plus, there are other players in the maze. They also have guns ... What would another player do if you met him? He can attack — he wants to be the first to get out of the maze — but he can also offer an alliance to survive. Finally, hide the board! Give it to one of the players and appoint him an adventure master!

From now on, instead of looking at the board, you listen to the adventure master. He’s the one who tells you how the place you are right now looks. You tell me where you want to go, and the adventure master tells you what happens next. We just created a primitive role-playing game. To put it simply, it contains an essential element of the game: players find themselves in an unknown, dangerous situation from which they have to cut themselves out. This is the essence of the role-playing game: the player embraces the personality of a character - created by himself - and controls this character during the game. You can define the look, equipment, and character of the character. The character can be a warrior, a powerful wizard, a healing priestess, a stray knight, or anything else you can imagine! The main physical and mental characteristics of the character are then determined by dice rolls. If the player reacts correctly to the situations created by the adventure master, he solves his tasks well, his character gets experience points. By gaining a certain amount of experience points, you move to a higher level of experience, that is, you become stronger, more resilient, and later have a better chance of coping with dangers.

Physically, this looks like the players and the adventure master are conveniently positioned - for example - around a table. The adventure master then begins to perform the adventure. He’s the players ’eyes and ears, he personifies the story’s side characters, and the players’ potential opponents. The game is a unity of interactive and narrative parts. Luck plays a role occasionally, the cubes are meant to simulate that. There is another very important difference between role-playing games and other games: the ultimate goal! It is a generally accepted rule that a game has a beginning and an end - and the end comes when someone wins. This is not true for role-playing games, because everyone here "wins"! The aim of the game is for the players to have fun, to get together, to have fun! Of course, adventure always has a purpose: to obtain a valuable relic from an evil dragon, to find the secrets of ruined cities, to help one empire against another. In a word, full of fairy tales and mystical stories ...

(Source: M.A.G.U.S.)