Dames Handsome is the author of the wildly-popular Fairy Knights children’s book series. He is a teacher, a dad, a husband, and a creative person who loves inspiring young minds. Based on a role-playing game he and his wife created for their young son, Fairy Knights books are ideal for creative adults who want to see the children in their lives explore, have fun, and level-up when they read.
Role-playing video games are an electronic game type in which players go through a main mission and frequently multiple side quests, gaining experience that improves different traits and skills for their character or party of characters. The genre is almost entirely based on TSR, Inc.’s Dungeons & Dragons (D&D; 1974), a small-group role-playing game in which each player takes on a different role, such as a healer, warrior, or wizard, to aid the player’s party in battling evil as directed by the group’s Dungeon Master, or assigned storyteller. While fantasy themes are still popular, video RPGs have also dabbled with science fiction and the shadowy world of espionage.
RPGs for a single player
D&D’s fantastical universe of elves, dwarves, trolls, goblins, and dragons, as well as its character attributes—constitution, strength, dexterity, intellect, wisdom, and charisma—were all preserved in early video RPGs. Dungeon (1975), an illegal adaptation for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 minicomputer, was the first attempt to create an electronic version of D&D. It had overhead maps of the dungeon that indicated where players had gone while being mostly a text-based implementation.
Tell us how role playing games inspired your writing?
I write in the LitRPG genre, a system of writing that is often sci-fi or sword and sorcery fantasy, but with statistics. It comes directly from role-playing games and the numbers and statistics have a huge impact on how the stories can resolve themselves. Unlike Harry Potter, the characters in role-playing games, and in this sort of writing, have concrete limitations that impact how they can overcome the problems that they face. Please visit my site for more information!