A roleplaying game, often shortened to RPG, represents a genre of gaming where participants embody fictional characters through spontaneous interactions. Essentially, an RPG constitutes an interactive and collaborative narrative experience. Unlike passive forms of entertainment like movies, books, and TV shows, RPGs actively involve players, enabling them to simultaneously function as the audience, performers, and storytellers.
Within a tabletop RPG context, players assume the roles of characters within an imagined scenario. This scenario is typically structured, managed, and sometimes even conceived by a "gamemaster" or "GM." The GM's responsibilities encompass describing the setting and characters for player interaction and determining the outcomes of these interactions. Furthermore, the GM might guide a storyline or plot, though its progression is influenced by player actions and dice rolls. To date, only three companies have been licensed to produce Star Wars roleplaying games.
From 1987 to 1998, West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. The supplemental materials created for West End Games' product line significantly contributed to unifying the previously fragmented Expanded Universe into a cohesive fictional world.
Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc., acquired the license and produced its own Star Wars Roleplaying Game from 1999 to 2010, integrating online features into the game system.
Fantasy Flight Games introduced a beta test version of Edge of the Empire at the Gen Con Game Fair in 2012. In 2013, Fantasy Flight launched the Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook, the first in a trilogy of Star Wars roleplaying game lines. The subsequent releases, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny, are designed to be compatible with each other.
The term "roleplaying game" also applies to certain video games where players assume a character's role within an imaginary setting, making choices that advance the narrative. These games often draw inspiration from the "tabletop" RPGs mentioned earlier, utilizing their rules to define characters. However, lacking the spontaneity of a human gamemaster and fellow players, the storyline tends to be somewhat more constrained.
While numerous Star Wars video and computer games incorporate storylines and roleplaying elements, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, stand out as the only single-player computer RPGs set within the Star Wars universe. Both titles utilize the mechanics of Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars Roleplaying Game. However, the creation of "modifications" has led to an expanded RPG universe where one would not exist. Such an example includes Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, which has various groups implementing RPG modifications to turn a free-for-all into a roleplayable universe.
Another type of computer RPG is the "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game," or "MMORPG," in which a large number of players control characters and interact in a virtual world online. Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided was one of three Star Wars MMORPGs, along with Star Wars: The Old Republic and the free-to-play Clone Wars Adventures. Its rules do not originate from any of the tabletop RPGs.
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