A traditional role-playing game, or tabletop role-playing game, is a form of role-playing game (RPG) in which each person playing the game will make-believe that he or she is a character in the game. A person playing the game will tell the action of his or her character, and a system of rules will tell whether the action can be done or not. The game will happen in a made-up world that is controlled by another person playing the game, called a gamemaster (GM). The gamemaster tells the game's story to the players, tells them where they are in the game world, and plays the part of all the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and monsters that the players meet.
The gamemaster will also give quests or tasks for the characters to complete. Characters usually have things about them that limit their actions, such as strength or speed, and as the character completes the quests, he or she is awarded experience points which can be used to make the character better.
Most tabletop RPGs use dice rolls when a player tries to do something hard in the game (Like attacking a monster, or jumping over a gap). This means that there is luck in the game, as well as skill. Most games have a system of bonuses so that they can succeed more often.
A short example:
GM: "You enter a small room. It is wet and smells bad. You hear water dripping from somewhere. You see a small, shaking pile of gray jelly in the middle of the room."
Player: "I touch the pile with the tip of my sword."
GM: "The jelly starts to move up your sword."
Player: "I drop my sword."
GM: "The jelly starts to eat your sword, but you are safe."
Good GMs balance challenges and rewards, giving the players the chance to recover from mistakes, but at the same time providing consequences for the player's actions. One example of this type of RPG is Dungeons & Dragons
There are also computer and videogame RPGs, where the player controls one or more characters. A good example is the Final Fantasy series of games. Just like the pre-computer RPGs, the characters in the games level up when they get EXP. They also usually contain a main quest which cannot be completed without completing smaller side quests. These computer RPGs are easier to play because they only need one person, but they also lack the freedom of the older games, where new quests can be made up whenever you want. MMORPGs (Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), are computer games where many players meet online in one large game world, and go on quests together. Some examples of these games are World of Warcraft, Everquest, or Runescape.
Text Based RPGs are not too different from Traditional RPGs, generally based on the Dungeons and Dragons game. However some Text Based RPGs are not for combat, but are for socializing and meeting others.
With many Text Based RPGs you need a client, a program to send what you say to the server, which can be located in another country. Many clients are basic and display text in one colour, but there are others that use colours, enhancing the readability of the content.
See MU* for more details.
In LARP, the people play their characters themselves, much like a play. They act out the things their character does, dress like their character, and often talk in the way their character would.
Arabic language
Arabic () is a Semitic language, like Hebrew and Aramaic. Around 292 million people speak it as their first language. Many more people can also understand it as a second language. The Arabic language has its own alphabet written from right to left, like Hebrew. Since it is so widely spoken throughout the world, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, the others being English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese.
Many countries speak Arabic as an official language, but not all of them speak it the same way. The language has many dialects, or varieties, such as Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic, Levantine Arabic and many others. Some of the dialects are so different from one another that speakers have a hard time understanding the other.
Most of the countries that use Arabic as their official language are in the Middle East. They are part of the Arab World because the largest religion in the region is Islam.
Arabic is very important in Islam because Muslims believe that Allah (God) used it to talk to Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel (Jibril), giving him the Quran in the language. Many but not all Arabic-speakers are Muslims.
Arabic is also becoming a popular language to learn in the Western world even though its grammar is sometimes very hard to learn for native speakers of Indo-European languages. Many other languages have borrowed words from Arabic because of its importance in history. Some English words that can be traced to Arabic are sugar, cotton, magazine, algebra, alcohol and emir.
Arabic is an official language of these countries:
It is also a national language of:
Dresden
Dresden (Upper Sorbian: "Drježdźany") is the capital of the Free State of Saxony. It is in the southeast of Germany, on the River Elbe near the border with the Czech Republic. It has an oceanic climate (Cfb in the Koeppen climate classification).
Dresden was already settled in the stone age, but the first written record of the city was in 1206, when Dresden began to develop as a royal residence.
Dresden was bombed a lot at the end of World War II. It was bombed by American and British bombers between 13 February and 15 February 1945. Most of the city's buildings were damaged beyond repair after the bombings. The city had to rebuild most of its buildings after the war.
In 2002 Dresden was flooded in Germany's so-called "century flooding".
Dresden is the political and cultural centre of Saxony. It is the seat of the governmental district of Dresden and of many universities. The number of inhabitants of the city exceeded 100,000 in about 1852.
Dresden has about 488,000 inhabitants (2005). Dresden forms the core of the densely populated area of the same name in Central Europe and is a traffic junction and an economic centre. Together with the population centres of Chemnitz, Zwickau and Leipzig, it forms the population centre known as the "Metropolregion Saxonia triangle" .
Dresden has got an international airport "(Flughafen Dresden-Klotzsche)" which has about 2 million passengers/year. This Airport has got daily flight connections to Frankfurt and Munich (Lufthansa), Moscow (Aeroflot), Cologne and Stuttgart (germanwings), Düsseldorf (germanwings) as well as to Zurich (InterSky), Hamburg (eurowings on behalf of germanwings) and London-City (CityJet). The biggest station is "Dresden Hauptbahnhof" (Dresden Main station) with an ICE (InterCityExpress) connection to Leipzig, Erfurt, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. There's an EuroCity connection to Prague, Graz and Vienna just as an InterCity connection to Berlin and Hamburg. The metropolitan of Dresden has got four highwas:
Dresden has got 3 S-Bahn (Metropolitan overground railway) lines and a big Tram network.
Free will
Free will is being able to choose between different actions. If we judge an action (for example, as good or bad) it only makes sense if the action is freely chosen.
Things like advice, persuasion, and prohibition, are pointless unless people have some kind of free will. Free will means people can do different things. Different results come from different courses of action. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed deserve credit or blame. If there is no free will, there is no sense or justice in rewarding or punishing anybody for any action.
Free will is a major problem in ethical philosophy, and is also relevant to the philosophy of science.
In ordinary life, and in law, people are generally assumed to have free will, and are responsible for what they do.