Of all the role-playing resources I have seen online, I have yet to see anything that begins at the ground level, something for those curious about gaming who have no knowledge. Time to rectify that.

Games We Know

Action games are the ones we drooled over as kids. Hungry, Hungry Hippo comes immediately to mind, as do Ants in the Pants, Perfection, Matchbox car race sets, even that robot boxing game where a KO is achieved by literally knocking your opponent's head off (when I was a kid, my Holy Grail of this type of game was called Colossal Fossil Fight, something of a cross between that robot game and Hungry, Hungry Hippos, but with dinosaurs. Never did get my hands on one. Ah. Well.). These games combine board games with toys, and I never knew a kid who always played those games the way they were "supposed" to be played.

We are all familiar with board games, old favorites ranging from Candyland, Chutes & Ladders and Sorry! to Clue, Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk to classics like backgammon, Go and chess. Card games are close relatives. These games have certain things in common. They are meant to be played by at least two people, they have an established field of play (the board), they incorporate avatars (the playing pieces), they are based on alternating (or cycling) turns, and there are defined rules regarding how to advance and, ultimately, what constitutes victory. From these parameters, the games themselves vary wildly in theme, scope, intellectual level and time required to play. Some use dice to determine the number of spaces a player may move her avatar, others add cards for random effects, some use play money or scorecards in order to track progress.

Party games are games like Pictionary, Outburst!, You Don't Know JACK and the like. These games emphasize socializing, meant to be played and enjoyed by a group. They occasionally include a board and avatars, but more usually they use props like paper and pencil, a box of cards, things like that. They often use a timed-contest format instead of turns, where one person, pair or group competes against another to see who can finish first. Sometimes, too, they use a vaguely turn-based system where the winner of one round becomes the focal point of the next (like in charades). Most emphasize talent (or lack of it) is some arena-knowledge of obscure facts, drawing ability, even music (impromptu games of Name That Tune come to mind). The fun comes from the social aspects of the gathering more than tactical or strategic maneuvering.

Action games, board games and party games all have one thing in common. They are competitive. Each of these games has rules determining what constitutes victory. Winning the game ends it, so by default, there are also rules determining what constitutes finishing the game. This sets the stage for an important counterpoint later, so keep it in mind.
Finally, there are games that don't really fall into the above categories. These are games that are purely social in nature, with no defined goal beyond having a good time with friends. Karaoke and truth-or-dare kinds of games fall here. Another kind that we can all identify with is likely the kind we are all the most separated from at this point in our lives.

Make-Believe

When we were children, the first kind of game we played was make-believe. It usually involved a lot of running around, hiding, screaming and laughter. We chased each other in games of tag, hunted during hide-and-seek, played as cowboys and cops and bandits and monsters. We shot each other with invisible bullets and rays, usually ending in a shouting match as to whether we hit or not. We saved the world and robbed the bank and came home at the end of the day, scuffed, exhausted and exhilarated.

There were quieter times, too, when we took on the roles of mommies and daddies, dressing up, having pretend lunch or tea. We would pretend at things that, later in life, would become pedestrian and ordinary. We shopped, and cooked, making our own decisions in ways we wanted to, and therein lay the fun.

Make-believe was a rich ground for us. We came up with impossible ideas, and occasionally even attempted some of them. Most didn't work, but that never stifled us. We dreamed all new disasters, building forts and making peculiar use of discarded bike parts and used appliances.

Video Games

Many of us, and many of our children, have found a new way to make-believe in video games. We take on the role of the hero who is going to save the day, no matter how many times we need to reload to do it. We explore worlds that are becoming more complex, but never bigger than, most of our old make-believe worlds ever were. We can, in video games, swing a mighty axe and watch the blood spray, we can command massive robotic machinery to do our bidding, we can fly in military aircraft over hostile territory or we can alter reality through the use of magic. It's full of color and sound effects, dramatic music and comic-book action rendered in real time.

On the down side, video gaming, even competitive head-to-head games in the spirit of Street Fighter 2 or Tekken, is an isolating, sedentary activity. In order to play, we must be in front of our monitor or TV, our bodies braced to get the best grip on the controller, and our attention is devoted, not to the person playing against us, but to the screen. Jibes and taunts may abound, but this is interaction at its basest level. Our hands play, our eyes play, we even get excited, but the lack of social aspect makes it nothing more than two people in the same room...and most of the time, it is only one person in the room to begin with.

Role-Playing Games

Role-playing games (RPGs) are most closely related to the way we all used to make-believe. Though there are many who enjoy live-action role-playing games (LARPs), most of us don't have the resources (or inclination, in some cases) to take it as far as costuming and going into someone's backyard to play-act out battles with the bad guys. This is where normal role-players diverge from the run-around-until-you're-exhausted kind of make-believe.
To put it simply, role-playing is about making a story. Most of the people in a gaming group make up characters for the story, the people the story revolves around. One person has a different responsibility. This person is the game's referee (called a game master in most games, a Dungeon Master, or DM, in Dungeons & Dragons). His or her responsibility is to set not only the stage, but the general plot of the story. She decides what possibilities for adventures are there for the characters to explore, figures out who or what awaits them as obstacles to achieving their goals, acts the parts of everyone and everything that is not the other players' characters (PCs) and is the game's ultimate referee.

In order to keep things from devolving into arguments about who is "dead" like happened so many times when we were kids, each RPG has its own set of rules. These rules come in books, and they are rules both the players and the DM must abide by in the sake of fairness and continuity. How hard is it to leap over a 20-foot gorge? Can a character buy a lightsabre? Did the dragon's fiery breath vaporize the character or just singe his clothes? RPGs have rules to cover these questions...and ideally, have enough internal logic and consistency that pretty much any question that could be asked regarding the game could be answered.

Most RPGs also incorporate the use of dice. Dice don't just come with six sides, like the ones you use for Monopoly or Yahtzee. They come with 4, 8, 10, 20, even 30 and 100 sides. Dice are a way of assigning probability to actions (did the scorpion inject enough venom to kill my character, or only enough to make him ill?) and adding a random factor (even the world's greatest Olympic athlete has off-days and occasionally a 60-year-old woman can lift a car off some trapped berk). They also prevent DM favoritism, as the dice fall how they fall.

Part 2: Playing a Role-Playing Game...