Roleplaying Tips

My approach to TRPGs is roleplaying-focused--I think that what TRPGs can uniquely handle relative to other games is roleplaying and storytelling. Storytelling is the province of the GM, but roleplaying falls to the players. Rich roleplaying helps tell stories in a more complete scale, and it only takes a little bit of practice to be a strong roleplayer. Follow these tips and you'll be prepared to fully inhabit your character at the game table as the story develops around you. 

The first quality of great roleplaying is a focus on performance. Try not to think about your performance as being something you're doing for an audience; your goal should not be to get your fellow players and your GM to appreciate what you're doing, but rather to enjoy yourself in the game. But the fact remains that you are in a sense performing for the other players and the GM, and honing that performance for them will enrich everyone's experience at the table. So how can you tailor your performance so that it reaches your fellow players? 

The first ingredient is how your character fits into the campaign. Is your character someone who drives the story forward or complicates it? Being aware of this detail can allow you to play the scenes in an appropriate way. If your character drives the story forward, they can take details of the plot and relate them to the way that the plot progresses. An example will help clarify: 

Let's say your character is a paladin who is driven by all that is good. Your campaign revolves around clearing the world of a particular type of evil enemy. The paladin is contributing to this actively by agreeing that the evil enemies need to be destroyed. So as a roleplayer, you get behind this goal for reasons that fit your character: your paladin takes the direction of destroying these enemies seriously and talks to the party, trying to convince them that they must help destroy these enemies. You are leaning into the direction of the story, so you act and speak in support of it. This is basic roleplaying. 

But let's say that instead your paladin is a rogue who is driven by all that benefits them. Your campaign still revolves around slaying the evil enemies. But your character doesn't exactly align with slaying all the enemies--the profit of doing so is negligible and your rogue thinks that the enemies are better left alone. So your character is complicating the story: you as a roleplayer voice the opinion that things are better left as they are and resist committing to killing all the enemies. You are leaning against the story, but by doing so, you have created a new story, one about your conflict over killing the enemies. This new story allows you further opportunities to roleplay as the other characters voice their own opinions. 

But now we have a division in the party. The paladin wants to slay the enemies and the rogue is reluctant to help. This leads us to our second consideration in roleplaying: advancing the story. It's perfectly possible that some members of a party will disagree with the others about how to advance, but we also don't want to spend an entire session arguing about what to do and ending up without a decision. So we compromise. Either the paladin or the rogue must capitulate to the other in order for the story to go anywhere. So as a roleplayer, we make the concession that we have voiced our opinion and that the party as a whole is leaning towards a certain option. And in the interest of advancing the story and keeping the peace between the players, we decide to agree with the other players; even though our rogue is opposed to killing the enemies, the rest of the party agrees with the paladin. It's better to agree and compromise roleplaying a bit than to commit completely to a disagreement. 

And this roleplaying compromise ends up being fairly minor. The rogue disagrees with the end result, but you still get to roleplay their hesitation and their preferred actions. Your compromise will be remembered by the other players, who now know that your rogue prefers not to target all the evil enemies around. This is a successful performance. You set out to portray your rogue faithfully, and you did. Mission accomplished. This is how to roleplay in the broadest sense, in terms of major game decisions. 

But roleplaying can work its way into any player decision. Let's say that your character is a bard who plays the lute, and a band of musicians enters the tavern where you are and begins to play. As a musician yourself, you are likely to take an interest in the band one way or another. So during the scene in the tavern, you could roleplay that your bard moves closer to the band during the performance and tries to speak with the performers after the performance. This would open further roleplaying opportunities as you meet the band and learn more about them. This is intermediate roleplaying. 

This is an example of a roleplaying moment that doesn't necessarily affect the story in any given way, but potentially could. And that's just fine! You don't need every roleplaying choice to become a major part of the game--you're just portraying a person with as much detail as possible. Once you've started to make decisions like this regularly, the GM and the other players will anticipate your character's personality. With the bard example, you might establish that your bard is intensely interested in all music, even minor moments in song. Roleplaying these moments consistently would mean that the GM could describe someone whistling in the distance and everyone at the table would turn to you to see what your bard does in response. This is part of the fun of roleplaying: getting so in-character that your character becomes real to other players. Not only does it allow you the chance to *be* your character, but it allows the other players rich roleplaying opportunities when they interact with you. 

You may notice that rich roleplaying like this can slow the game down. All the time spent in-character means that the story is not advancing at full speed. This can be fine, depending on your group. If your GM is running a roleplay-heavy campaign, this should be invited and celebrated. If you're in a group that focuses more on combat and tightly-scripted stories, you should probably speak with your GM to decide how much roleplaying is invited in your game; speaking with the other players can help too so that you can get a sense of who wants to have in-game conversations at length and who just wants to get to the next dungeon. Try to meet people halfway, just as you would want them to do the same for you. TRPGs are a collaborative format, so work with your group to find the right balance. 

If you are in a roleplaying group, it's always possible to take roleplaying to the next level. Again, it helps to work with your GM on details like these. If your GM and player group agree that the focus of the campaign is roleplaying, then dive in and get as invested as you like. Here's where the next part of roleplaying allows you to access advanced roleplaying and its benefits. 

Backstories are an often-ignored element of roleplaying development. I've written before about how to develop characters for roleplaying, and the big key is developing a rich enough backstory that your character has a realistic range of responses to things. In the linked article, I explain the lengths to which I went to create a vivid backstory for my cleric Zig--you can and should feel welcome to create as much as you like, but there are certain points you should always include in developing a backstory for your character:

• What is my character's family like? Friends? Work associates? Even a loner is likely to have a few connections here and there, and the average person will have at least five major people in their lives. Mix up the "tragically alone" backstory that most characters have and design a few people in your character's life. Determine not just the relation but also what these people are like and what kind of dynamic they have with your character. 
• What does my character do to sustain themself? Sure, they're an adventurer, but how exactly do they pay the bills? What did they do before doing what they do now? How do they feel about these kinds of work? 
• What are your character's major life events? Even young characters have been alive for a few dozen years, and a lot is likely to have happened in that time. I advise you create a major life event for every 3-5 years in your character's life--things like moving homes, meeting friends and loved ones, finding new jobs, serious accomplishment or setbacks, any of the tragic events that tend to make up a character backstory. 
• What are your character's values? I don't just mean this in terms of alignment or some other measure of morality. I mean, what things matter to your character? Family, wealth, independence, faith, nature, violence, tradition, humor--what does your character appreciate, get bugged by, or feel indifferent to? 
• What is your character experienced in? You may decide this before or after designing your character's stats, but you should be able to answer a few questions: What are they really good at? Pretty okay at? Terrible at? How did they get good at the things they're good at? How do they feel about doing things they're not great at? How confident are they at what they're good at? 

These five overarching ideas will give you a good idea what your character is like in a way that allows you to roleplay with more detail. Specifically, each idea fills in details that you can use to roleplay. Here are some examples:

• Once you have determined the identities of the people in your character's life, you have lots of options. The GM could add them to the story if appropriate--don't be afraid to ask them to. You'll also have a host of memories of each person that your character can describe in the game, which will make them seem more richly detailed. You might roleplay, for instance, that a certain vendor reminds your character of their mother, and so they frequent the vendor's stall out of a form of nostalgia. With details like these, you can roleplay in a way that makes your character's past and present much more colorful. 
• If you know your character's work history, you know their attitudes on work-related tasks. Perhaps your party needs to patch up a boat with a damaged hull; your character has done woodworking before and hates it, so they reluctantly agree to work on the boat, but go about it in a sour mood. This is much more interesting than "I fix the boat." 
• Once you know your character's major life events, you have a host of things that have colored your character's opinions. Let's say you've decided that your character was scammed by a con artist years ago and lost almost everything. Now there's a street performer who seems to be trying a quick change trap. Your character has a serious issue with this, and now you can respond to the street performer in a way that's realistic to your character. By another token, your character might have spent a brief period of time as a street performer and take pity on them. It all depends on who you've decided your character is. 
• Character values are perhaps the most common and easiest roleplaying moments. Much of a TRPG is centered around making choices about moral issues, so knowing your character's values will allow you to make those choices meaningfully. Let's say your character broadly approves of tradespeople but takes specific issue with predatory pricing. So when a tradesperson offers a steep price for something, your character must now balance their respect for tradespeople with their distaste for being overcharged. This complex moment is really only possible if you have developed a rich set of values first. 
• Your character's experience allows for both strategic planning and rich roleplay. If you've determined that your character is an amateur woodcarver, then you'd get a boost to fashioning a wooden peg to hold a fortress door in place. But you also get to carve when you have downtime, wield a carving knife in tense situations, sell the occasional carving, and talk knowledgeably with other carvers. Each character detail can be useful in various scenarios, and it's well worth deciding what your character is good at that skill bonuses don't always measure. 

Thus, with a proper backstory, you will be prepared for great roleplaying. As noted above, though, you may sometimes need to compromise. If your rich character detail makes the story much more complicated and difficult for the whole party and the GM, feel free to voice it, but minimize its effect on the story. Simply put, everyone at the table is performing, and everyone gets a turn, but no one is the star. So be able and willing to accept when your character details are interesting but not story-affecting. 

The final concept that a roleplayer must keep in mind is the spirit of improvisation. I've addressed this from the GM perspective before, and it's largely the same for players, but I will go into it briefly here as well for this context. Essentially, improv directs us to always respond to someone else's addition to the story with a "yes, and..." That means that when someone adds something, you accept it as part of the story without challenging it and add something to it. For example, another player in your game says, "I gather up all my coins and hand them to the beggar." The GM says, in proper "yes, and..." form, "The beggar pulls out an oversized coinpurse and drops in all your coins with a series of clinking sounds." The GM is accepting that the beggar is receiving the money and is adding the detail that the beggar already has a fair amount of money. You as a character who was miserably poor decide that you are entertained by this and add: "I take a gold piece from my coinpurse and delicately hand it to the beggar." You as player accepted that the beggar was actually well-off and contributed anyway because that's what your character would do. This is basic "yes, and...", which is essentially the format of TRPGs when roleplaying is involved. 

There is a variation on "yes, and..." which can be helpful to roleplayers whos characters have specific details that affect their decisions. It is called "no, but..." and it works like this: when a player or GM suggest something that you have control over and your character details tell you it would go another way, you don't just say that it would not work that way; you offer an alternative in its place. So to return to the above example, let's say that the beggar is revealed to have quite a bit of money and looks to you, reaching out a hand for more coins, and let's say your character hates when people are misleading. You might criticize or even attack the beggar; you may insist they return your ally's money; you may storm off without engaging. But you took your character's personality and used it to guide the actions in the game. That's successful roleplaying and storytelling. 

Roleplaying also benefits from small details. It can be immersive for yourself and other players if you adopt a character voice--even only a slight variation on your voice can help distinguish your player additions from your character additions. I myself wear little totems of my character--a fake wedding ring, a holy symbol, an eyepatch, anything that gets you more into your character's head than your own. There are loads of questionnaires out there that ask dozens or even hundreds of questions about your character--this can be great when developing your character's personality and past so you have a broader and more specific idea of who you're playing. And of course, if you can get to the point where you can turn on and off the ability to think in character, you'll be primed for success as a roleplayer--you can practice this by simply considering what you've developed and making hypothetical decisions. By the time you need to make a choice in-game, you'll be well-versed in how your character thinks. 

One last thing that can help you to enrich your roleplaying is what I call "character-specific actions." A character-specific action is something your character would do that doesn't add to any sense of the game except for roleplaying. Let's imagine that your character is a wood carver and ends up in the woods. A combat focus would tell you to remain wary of potential ambushes. A storytelling focus would tell you to take note of the way the wilderness behaves when interacted with. But a character-specific action would let you develop your roleplaying. By this token, your character might scan the ground for good pieces of wood for carving, taking special note of pieces that are shaped in ways that would lead to a good carving. You can do this without setting the focus of the campaign aside--it only takes a moment to define your character's minor interests. Try character-specific actions when you sense your character might want to do something that isn't covered by standard approaches to the game. 

These tips can all help you to be a better roleplayer, but the biggest key will always be to have a character model you're deeply interested in. So if you can, start with a core tension or detail that you find fascinating and build your character around that. I built both the characters in this guide from ideas I found interesting--enforced morality and guilt issues--and both have been great jumping off points for the stories that have followed. 

Have fun out there, and remember: TRPGs are built in a way that allows for collaborative storytelling in a way that no other system allows. So make the most of it, improve your roleplaying skills, and enjoy your games!

Coming soon: how to deal with player issues, how to design your homebrew setting, and a list of campaign ideas and how to run them. Until next time, happy gaming!

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