In the 80′s, pencil and paper roleplaying games were the most common form. Games like Dungeons and Dragons set the standard for RP. This form of RP took a great deal of inventiveness and imagination on the part of the players. There was not a detailed environment to look at or even a visible avatar. Everything was created through a person’s own thoughts and imagination, with some guidance of books and others playing.

With the start of home computers, AOL became another source of roleplaying. Early on, home computers were most often used for chat rooms. This broadened the number of people that a person could RP with and an ease of creating variety of scenarios. Personally, I feel that this also opened the door to bending the rules of RP. With pencil and paper games, there were established rules of how players could interact. With the use of chat rooms, most rules went out the digital window.

As computers became more common in households, computer games began to flood the market. MUDs or mutli-user dungeons, were around before the 80′s, but most homes did not have a personal computer. In the late 80′s, these games grew in popularity. This was basically a pencil and paper game, with a basic set of rules, only texted on a computer. This brought back some of the older presets of roleplaying with access to a larger spectrum of users.

Many people will consider a game called Everquest to be one of the first roleplaying computer games. While this is extremely untrue, it is one of the first recognizable games to younger people. Everquest allowed for a living, breathing environment to roleplay a story. A person could actually stand face to face with another person’s avatar, make motions, choose an environment that suited the story being played out. The options became seemingly unlimited. Many people chose to play the game like a console game. Questing, leveling, learning, exploring were all the general gameplay styles. However, there were a number of gamers who took advantage of this new environment to RP.

Over the years, some people have stayed the course and still use pencil and paper games today. Others have chosen MMORPGs as their roleplaying platform. Whichever you choose, remember that it is a game and should be fun to the people involved. RP should never feel like a job or chore. If a story line ever begins to feel this way, it might be a good time to change characters, redevelop a story, or walk away from RP for a bit.

I did a lot of keyword research online and I found out some remarkable information. Most search engines prefer to separate the word to role playing. This normally refers to the actual action of role playing, whether it is game or non-game related. The single word, roleplaying, seems to be the favored way of spelling by the majority of tabletop publishers. However, I did find instances of each unique way of spelling the word being used by publishers.

The abbreviation, RPG, is the most popular way to spell it as far search engines go. This is because RPG is an abbreviation for several different things, such as role playing games or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It also is usually linked more with video games than tabletop roleplaying games. If you did a search on the keyword RPG, you would most likely discover a lot of video games websites with a few tabletop roleplaying games and a bit of other site-types.

In the end, I chose to spell the word as, roleplaying. My influence to do this was mostly due to two factors. First, most key roleplaying games spell it as one, non-hyphenated word. Case in point, Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf Publishing consistently spell it roleplaying in their game books and websites. Secondly, if you do a search on the single, non-hyphenated word, roleplaying, you will discover mostly tabletop roleplaying games. That is my primary focus, so I chose to go that route. As soon as you start to branch into role playing, role-playing, or RPG, you are going into primarily video game areas. Although for years I’ve often referred to tabletop roleplaying games in my verbal dialogue as “RPGs”, I’ve discovered that when talking about tabletop roleplaying games online, “Roleplaying” is the way to go.

Samuel Van Der Wall writes about roleplaying games, miniatures, gaming, and geek culture. Read more of his articles at h