Hello youse.

This week I’ve been hard at it, shooting the second series of Burnistoun, a BBC TV show I do here in Scotland. Dressing up as Popes and superheroes all day and learning lines all night doesn’t leave you a great deal of time for games. Sitting around between scenes gives you plenty of time to talk about games, though, so I’ve been telling people about the games I play and encouraging them to try some out. I mentioned RPGs to someone, and got a bit of a blank look. And that got me thinking.

In the comments section last week, or maybe the week before, an interesting question popped up. “What exactly is a pen and paper RPG?” Something along those lines. And I realised that I had been referring to pen and paper RPGs in this column without ever stopping to explain exactly what one is. I had obviously assumed that everyone was just like me, and had spent their teenage years creating RPG campaigns for friends instead of sticking their tongues down the throats of young brunettes OH GOD WHAT A WASTE.

So, this week, I want to talk about the tabletop pen and paper RPG. A brief introduction and an explanation, so I don’t need to cover any of this again when I go into detail on specific games in future columns. And then some pointers on how to be a good Gamesmaster.



You good people play PC games, so you’ll be well aware of what an RPG is. It’s a Role Playing Game. An example of an RPG in the PC gaming world would be something like Return To Krondor or maybe the budget re-release of Return To Krondor. In an RPG game you “Play A Role”. (That’s where the “Role-Playing” element of RPG comes from.) And then you Play that Role in a Game. That completes the Holy Trinity of letters R, P and G, and explains why they sit together, and why they sit together in that order, and what they mean, and why they mean that.

In a PC game, the administrative element of the mechanics of your character’s statistics is taken out of your hands, allowing you to better focus on the immersive experience of moving a stiffly animated freakish-looking fucker around a half-arsed game world, having unbending pre-scripted encounters with automatons who have voices supplied by the best amateur theatre understudies in the UK.

In a tabletop pen and paper RPG, you have to create everything inside your own mind. Your imagination, which is usually only called into play when trying to squeeze some tiny drops of pleasure out of fucking your spouse*, is suddenly given the job of creating a living, breathing universe. Everything you want to do in the game, you can try to do. If the Gamesmaster tells you you’ve just wandered into the lair of a Dragon, you can choose to fight it, or fondle it, or sing to it, or cook for it, or challenge it to a game of horseshoes, or do a hundred squats in front of it, or teach it how to use the Sky+ remote control. If the Gamesmaster is happy to let you try to do any of these things, you will have the chance to do it. No PC game will allow this to happen. Ever. Unless it’s the next PC game by Peter Molyneux, and the person who is telling you that Peter Molyneux’s game will be able to do this is Peter Molyneux.

Almost all pen and paper RPGs are fundamentally the same, which is why we like to call them “pen and paper RPGs” despite many of them not needing pens or paper anymore. They have a Gamesmaster, and some players, and some created characters. They have a setting of some kind – the future, the past, a fantasy world, a sci-fi world, a zombie apocalypse. They have a ruleset that allows you to work out the success or failure of certain tasks. Usually you’ll use dice to communicate with the unruly spirits of Fate, but other methods exist (even the use of Jenga blocks).

Each player will be responsible for the upkeep of his character. They will have to keep track of abilities, knowledge, possessions, motivations, and will often be responsible for fleshing out a backstory. A bad Gamesmaster is in charge of everything else. The universe, the non-player characters, the encounters, the storyline, the goals, the friends, the enemies –

Wait, hold up… Did I just type “A bad Gamesmaster is in charge of everything else”? Yes, I did. And here’s why – a good Gamesmaster merely pretends to be in charge of everything else. In truth, he is handing the universe over to the players, to shape it as they see fit. He’s a universe wrangler, that’s all, keeping everything under control, but beautifully in flux.

The Gamesmaster is the key to the whole thing. So here’s my list of pointers for any first time GM.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GAMESMASTER