Role playing games are a participatory. To fully witness the artwork that is a role-playing game you must contribute to it. There is not a separate audience and creator.

The contributors to a role-playing game separate into the Game, the Gamesmaster (GM) and the Players.

The Game is usually a book. Such books are artworks in themselves: well written and illustrated, worth reading even if you never get to play the game. They are works of fiction without narratives, they describe a world, bits of its history, its cultures, its landscape, but without any main narrative. This will be provided by the Gamesmaster and Players, if the game is played. If it is not, it is still a piece of narrative-free fiction.

Then there are the Players and the Gamesmaster. They, within the world created by the Game, tell a story. The players play the lead characters, dictating what their characters do and say, while the Gamesmaster controls the bit-part characters and the rest of the world.

Players are encouraged to create fully rounded, or hilariously caricatured, characters, but often not contribute to the plot to any great extent, with is supplied by the Gamesmaster as a series of things thrown up for the players to deal with. This leads to plots that less character driven. Stories are often pre-written by the GM, and discovered, piece by piece, by the players.

Live-Role-Playing (LRP) puts the players in costume, and has them physically acting characters rather than merely saying what they do. With small groups their is a second group called Monsters, of which the GM is one, who play the bit-parts. Far larger groups of players can play LRP games because for their character to do something they don't need to get themselves heard stating what they will do, instead they just do it. Thousands can inhabit the same world, and as such, plots often become far more character driven. Monsters and GMs become less needed.

The method by which Ken Loach makes his films is particularly similar to role-playing, the actors having to react to each situation. But I’m not sure how far the strict structure of role-playing, by which every character controls only himself, and the rest is controlled by the GM, goes into the making of this film. In Sweet Sixteen (don’t read on if you haven’t seen it, this is one of his best films) a caravan bought by the lead character is burned down, and his friend later claims to have done it. As the fire happened off screen are we to assume that the actor playing his friend went up to ken loach and said “I’m going to burn down the caravan”, or was he in-fact lying when he claimed to have burnt it?