The question "So what is this roleplaying thing?" seems always guarenteed to tie the most avid players in knots, stuttering and unable to answer. It must be every gamers nightmare to be asked this by some well-meaning and totally ignorant person, but they have to know. The Net is no exception to this pattern, lots of people want to know, and lots of people are unsure how to answer them.
Even here in the Encyclopedia it seems clear to us that no one answer will ever satisfy, so we decided that the best technique was to compile a list to all the articles of this sort that we know about, including our own.
At the same time we have taken the opportunity to invstigate the background isea of Roleplaying more closly, in the Introductions to Roleplaying articles.