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Empty Space Roleplaying games are cooperative efforts between two or more players who portray characters in an unfolding story. This portrayal is usually done by verbal exposition with dice being used to resolve the results of a character's efforts in an arbitrary fashion. The majority of roleplaying games focus on heroic characters who are more powerful in their world than the player is in ours.

Roleplaying games developed in the 1970's, the first major one to be published being TSR's Dungeons and Dragons. Since then numerous systems have been published by various companies. TSR made several other games, such as Gamma World. Metagaming published The Fantasy Trip. FGU published many, Chivalry and Sorcery being the most prominent. Chaosium published RuneQuest and then Call of Cthulhu and others. Steve Jackson Games published GURPS.

The original game systems, with the sole exception of RuneQuest, were all written without regard for a specific gameworld. This gave the players the freedom to create any world they desired, but also required them to do so. The effort this requires prompted TSR to publish the World of Greyhawk as a campaign game world. Now it is common place for a game to be set in a specific world. While very little has been done to advance the gaming systems themselves much has been achieved in detailing various worlds. The epitome of this approach is GURPS which uses the same system for every game world -- and numerous worlds have been detailed.

There have been a few variations, most notable being the innovations of White Wolf in the realm of live action with games such as Vampire. The recent crop of roleplaying games tend to the strange or unusual, such as diceless gaming and inhuman characters and themes.

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