Game Play
The players initially play explorers from Known Space, sent as scouts to the Ringworld. They can be anthropologists, artists, doctors, police, or even zealots, who will explore the mysteries of this huge artificial world and its inhabitants. Basic characters can be humans from a dozen planets of Human Space, Puppeteers, or Kzin. Later play can see characters from Ringworld species, such as the (so-called) Ghouls, Vampires, Giants, Sea People, and others.
This Ringworld focus has been a criticism of the game. The Ringworld role-playing game is not a 'full' science fiction RPG, like Traveller, including, for example, rules for starship construction, space combat, travel to different planets and systems, and so forth. Instead, the game and rules focused on parties of characters exploring the Ringworld itself, and, despite its vast size (with a surface area larger than that of all of Known Space's inhabited planets put together), many who bought the game felt limited by this one world setting.
Read more about this topic: Ringworld (role-playing Game)
Famous quotes containing the words game and/or play:
“In the game of “Whist for two,” usually called “Correspondence,” the lady plays what card she likes: the gentleman simply follows suit. If she leads with “Queen of Diamonds,” however, he may, if he likes, offer the “Ace of Hearts”: and, if she plays “Queen of Hearts,” and he happens to have no Heart left, he usually plays “Knave of Clubs.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)