Ooops, my bad.

GM = Game Master, aka "storyteller", aka "Game Operations Director", aka the friend who's got the rule book. They set the tone and create the scene. They are director, producer, special effects, writer (not editor- the players make you change things as they go along), property master and fight choriographer. (Players bring food, so you at least get out of being caterer.) You don't find RPGs in Bunnies and Burrows, for example (think Rats of NIMH or Watership down, and you get to be a bunny), but you might in a different setting, such as, say, "what if HG Wells War of the World happened today; what would your characters do". If you find something like an LAW, sure, feel free to use it.

The results can be quite funny if the character doesn't know how to use it. I'm thinking of a particular character who tossed a flash bang into a fuel dump.... Nonleathal, right!

Roleplaying games, all the propaganda and xenophobia aside, are nothing more or less than a sand table exercise with some mechanics to simulate probability/chance/TSHTF. That's the "playing game" part of it.

The "role" part of it is becuase you generally try not to play you, it isn't as much fun, but every single one of us playes a public character that is a little different from thier private person- if you work with the public, and want to just slap the next idiot who calls you with a stupid question that you've already been asked fourty times in the last six hours and you need to pee but the phone keeps ringing and the supervisor has been giving you the evil eye all week so you can't park the call and sprint for the head, well, you just have to put that part of you away for a bit and roleplay being a nice, calm person. Not the axe murderer lurking just under the surface.

Although thinking about what you could do with that person and an axe if there was no repercussions can be soothing after they hang up. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />