How to Roleplay

[Tanarii]

A Guide on How to Roleplay

Make decisions for your character in the fantasy environment.

Seriously, that's all there is to it.

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Every decision you make for your character in the imaginary environment of the game (ie the "fantasy" environment) is roleplaying. Non-decisions are not. Although the latter are often very important/useful to way the game feels, as well as the group's overall enjoyment.

Decisions can be based on various things, of course. In fact, most people do some combination of roleplaying, or making decisions, based on:
- the mechanical aspects of their character.
- the fictional persona of their character.
- the current situation in the imaginary environment.
- desired outcomes or consequences.
- expressing the story (narrative results) in one's head.

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I'm sure this thread will get interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing alternative takes from my own. I'll be the first to admit that my definition of roleplay is a very "big tent" one, designed to capture the wide variety of RPGs and what people do in them. But I think it's a useful thing to keep in the back of your mind, to keep your eye on, even as you drill down into the specific aspects of how you want to roleplay, which subset of the big tent you want to focus on, in a specific given system, table, character, or situation.

Let's keep insults to a minimum please.

[Dracojai]

The second, and more complicated phase, is being consistent with the reasoning behind said choices.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Why wouldn't talking in character to other people be roleplaying even if you're not currently making decisions?

[Tanarii]

The second, and more complicated phase, is being consistent with the reasoning behind said choices.

That's a thing? I think you're asking too much. We're only human.

Why wouldn't talking in character to other people be roleplaying even if you're not currently making decisions?

I don't know about you, but when I have my characters talk to other people in the fantasy environment, I'm making lots of decisions for what the character does. Or says, rather.

[BlizzardSucks80]

Yeah, like making big decisions that could drastically affect the fate of one's character. I like that.
A few examples I could think of would be:

Deciding if you want to make your D&D Paladin keep that shiny Lawful Good alignment, or fall into corruption, lust, greed, etc.

Being a thief in a small crew of other thieves and deciding whether or not to betray the others so that you can have a larger share of the loot. Or holding onto that idea that maybe there is honor amongst thieves and maybe you have some family-like connection to the other thieves, who know?


Being the leader of a village or settlement and deciding to ally with another village or raid them mercilessly for their food and loot.


Being an apprentice mage in a wizard's tower and one of your fellow mages starts using dark forbidden magic but for a good cause (little sister is sick, grandma has Alzheimer's, helping the beggar underdogs in the streets, etc.) If the head mages found about this, that fellow mage of yours would probably get expelled at best, or horribly executed at worst. What do you do? Sell him/her out and gain a reputation as a snitch, or keep it a secret, and possibly be labeled an accomplice to these crimes?


Siding with the BBEG at the last minute, betraying your party and friends, because maybe you gave into the BBEG's promise of ultimate power at his/her side?

[War_lord]

I'm going to grab my popcorn and not rise to the bait.

[Anonymouswizard]

Part C) there is a difference between not making a choice and choosing to do nothing.

[Tanarii]

Part C) there is a difference between not making a choice and choosing to do nothing.

Good point, well made.

[Actana]

My biggest concern with that definition is that it's too broad and contradicts how people use the phrase. People often hear games being described as "roleplay-heavy" and "roleplay-light", most often correlating to how much combat there is. So as a descriptive word, simply taking actions as a character in a fantasy environment doesn't really cut it. You make decisions while in combat, thus rendering combat roleplaying. Yet I don't see many arguments in favor of tactical grid based combat being roleplaying, at least except in the most semantic way. So as far as I see it, those two seem to have something separating the two.


Personally, I use the (rough) definition of "roleplaying is the act of making choices within a fantasy environment where the emphasis is on making those choices as the character would make them, instead of emphasizing the gameplay mechanics of that choice."


Of course, this doesn't mean that highly tactical grid-based combat minigames "aren't roleplaying", or that it's bad. It's just another part of the game which by default emphasizes the mechanics of the game more than the characters, with typically less roleplaying. I personally enjoy tactical combat, but I wouldn't call my tightly focused overhead placement of a fireball so that it strategically doesn't affect my allies "roleplaying". It's very much me, as the player, engaging with the mechanics. At the same time, refusing to attack some enemy because they're my characters mentor is absolutely roleplaying, despite being in that combat minigame.

It's not the most airtight foolproof definition, but it's one that I'm happy with as it solves an issue I've found fairly often.

[Tanarii]

It's very intentionally a definition to try and knock some sense into the heads of people that think combat doesn't involve roleplaying. Because that is wrong. Combat involves tons of roleplaying.

At a certain point, you've divorced/abstracted the mechanics of the system, including tactical combat on a grid, sufficiently from imagining the character in the fantasy environment that they only seem to be weakly tied together. And that's why some people try to draw a dividing line between them.

But yes, the most common modification of it for most people is "making decisions in character in the fantasy environment".

[War_lord]

It's very intentionally a definition to try and knock some sense into the heads of people that think combat doesn't involve roleplaying. Because that is wrong. Combat involves tons of roleplaying.

And bait thread confirmed, good job everybody.

[Anonymouswizard]

It's very intentionally a definition to try and knock some sense into the heads of people that think combat doesn't involve roleplaying. Because that is wrong. Combat involves tons of roleplaying.

Of course this means picking my wizard's six starting spells (Find Familiar, Fog Cloud, Disguise Self, Silent Image, Mage Armour, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter) was as much roleplaying as whether I use my turn to cast Fog Cloud or Minor Illusion (I have no hp damage magical abilities or ranged weapons, this will be fun ). Which feels a little off.

Of course, whether I cast Silent Image or Mage Hand is roleplaying, so I think that, assuming people are familiar with basic roleplaying terminology, it becomes 'making in-character decisions in a fantasy environment)'. Removes the silly bit of some, but not all, parts of character creation being roleplaying.

[Tanarii]

I'm not trying to claim all decisions are equally important. Or sensible.

But IMX character creation usually takes place outside the fantasy environment. It's a precursor to it. So it doesn't feel like part of roleplaying the character to me personally, it feels more like the pre-game "metagame". Was that your point?

That said, if someone else told me they considered the decisions in creating a character are part of roleplaying the character, I could see where they were coming from.

[KillianHawkeye]

Okay, combat can or can not involve roleplaying depending on how you approach it.

If you always take the most tactically advantageous actions regardless of the situation, you probably aren't roleplaying so much as playing the tactical combat game (unless your character is an actual master tactician). On the other hand, focusing your efforts on a particular foe because he's the one who insulted you, defeated you once before, or murdered your parents, despite the fact that there may be better actions you could take, is definitely roleplaying. Spending your actions on healing because your character is strongly committed to healing or maybe has just lost too many friends to injuries sustained in battle, despite the prevalent view that healing in combat is typically less useful than ending the combat sooner, is also roleplaying. But healing the unconscious Fighter only because you know out-of-character that they're at -9 hp and about to die isn't, because you're acting on information your character doesn't know.

Basically, roleplaying intersects with combat action any time you base your actions on your in-character motivations rather than your out-of-character human observations of the situation and knowledge of basic game strategy. These aren't always mutually exclusive.

[kyoryu]

But IMX character creation usually takes place outside the fantasy environment. It's a precursor to it. So it doesn't feel like part of roleplaying the character to me personally, it feels more like the pre-game "metagame". Was that your point?

That said, if someone else told me they considered the decisions in creating a character are part of roleplaying the character, I could see where they were coming from.

It totally depends on whether the aspects of character creation you're dealing with are something under the character's control, historically, or not.

[Tanarii]

But healing the unconscious Fighter only because you know out-of-character that they're at -9 hp and about to die isn't, because you're acting on information your character doesn't know.

Theres no reason that the characters dont know some equivilent in-universe of what the players know out.

Yes, there is a point at which the abstraction is too divorced/removed from what is supposed to be going on in universe that it is very hard to map from one to the other. But a chqracter about to die mapping to "I can see this character is gasping their last breath and about to die" is rarely one of them. Ditto for many decisions based on the combat mechanics of many games. They easily map.

For more on what I'm talking about:
http://theangrygm.com/through-a-glas...er-seperation/

[KillianHawkeye]

Theres no reason that the characters dont know some equivilent in-universe of what the players know out.

Yes, there is a point at which the abstraction is too divorced/removed from what is supposed to be going on in universe that it is very hard to map from one to the other. But a chqracter about to die mapping to "I can see this character is gasping their last breath and about to die" is rarely one of them. Ditto for many decisions based on the combat mechanics of many games. They easily map.

I don't think it's so easy to tell "gasping [one's] last breath" apart from any other gasping that a character who will die in the next 7 to 54 seconds might do. Then what about all the times people bleed to death without gasping?

Maybe if you're alone with them in a quiet place, giving them some last bit of comfort before the inevitable end. But during a battle, when you might be 10 or 50 feet away, with monsters or enemy soldiers about and the clash of weapons and magical explosions or summoned creatures or a complicated death trap?

Yeah, no. I call BS.

To begin with, there's no easy way to tell at a glance if the blow that knocks out an ally took them down to -1 or -9, so you've got no clue how much time you have to save someone. Likewise, you wouldn't be able to tell how bad their injuries are or if they've stabilized or not without going to check on them.

Realistically, when an ally goes down, you either decide right away that you need to go over and help them or decide right away that you'll have to just hope they hang in there while you keep up with the fight. To act like everything is fine until they reach -9 hp, without any means of determining when that actually happens, and then suddenly deciding to go heal them at the last second is simply metagaming, not roleplaying.

[WindStruck]

Simply making a decision isn't roleplaying. You have to use your imagination, try and pretend what if you were your character, make choices and execute actions like them. Don't look at where you want the game to go. Look at what your character's long-term desires are.

[Darth Ultron]

A Guide on How to Roleplay

Make decisions for your character in the fantasy environment.

Seriously, that's all there is to it.

Your advice is more ''how to play a role playing game'', not how to role play.

To role play you want to pretend that you are the character 100%. You, quite literal, want to play the role of another person. Hence the word.

And note, if your thinking about the mechanics of the game: your roll playing, not role playing.

And if your thinking about the game in real life as you make decisions for a character, you are metagaming.

[Mr Blobby]

...People often hear games being described as "roleplay-heavy" and "roleplay-light", most often correlating to how much combat there is. So as a descriptive word, simply taking actions as a character in a fantasy environment doesn't really cut it. You make decisions while in combat, thus rendering combat roleplaying. Yet I don't see many arguments in favor of tactical grid based combat being roleplaying, at least except in the most semantic way. So as far as I see it, those two seem to have something separating the two...

Plus, there are still 'Roleplay opportunities' within combat or just before/after. Having, for example a character who without hesitation checks the bodies afterwards and not only goes for the bling but also pats down for loose change etc - I'm playing a character right now who checked the bodies to see if their boots were better than hers [not enchanted, merely 'nicer'] and got in a sulk that they couldn't loot an armoury says more to everyone about that character's upbringing than merely stating 'they grew up very poor'.

[Pleh]

Simply making a decision isn't roleplaying.

This can't be stated strongly enough.

A lot of mechanical decisions are more like calculations than role play.

Sure, it's true that at times what the character wants to do and what the player wants to do will be identical, but if they're NEVER different, then you're looking at a very LIMITED form of roleplaying, which is to say exclusively the kind that places yourself into a scenario.

What you probably mean to say is that roleplaying doesn't NEED to be anything more than this at any point. That's correct, self-insertion is the basic minimum requirement to begin roleplaying. However, this is a fairly large and vague definition of Roleplaying to the point that playing Chess might be considered Roleplaying, thus putting us dangerously close to another, "X term is meaningless" debate (that never accomplishes anything, if you've noticed). Might as well embrace Collaborative Storytelling and Sandbox if we're allowing Roleplaying to be defined so broadly as to include Chess.

However, any attempts to use that to suggest that there is anything wrong with taking Roleplaying further than basic self-insertion is fruitless and insulting. For players show up for the roleplay, simply putting themselves into the story may not be challenging enough for them and so naturally they reach to become another person as they stretch their acting skills. It's the same with the game's crunchy combat systems. Some people like to keep it lightweight and streamlined because they want to get THROUGH the combat. Others want it heavy and technical because it's really the main event that they even bothered to show up for and they want it to actually challenge them somewhat. Just the same with Roleplay that some just want to hurry up and get to the results of their choices while others want to feel the weight and tension of having to make tough choices with characters that have conflicted motivations (that may also conflict with the player's motivations).

If the only choices to be made are mechanical calculations, you're not really playing the game of making hard choices. You're just running numbers. Don't get me wrong; running numbers can be meaningful. Strategy games are all about reaping the benefits of making good calculations while under pressure. But Roleplaying is more about overcoming an internal tension on the battlefield of the soul, mastering the compelling sense of motive inside a character and following their pursuit of these motivations to whatever end.

The Angry DM talks a big game about how pretending to be someone else is used to cover for bad game behavior, but the way he talks about it makes it seem clear to me that this attitude towards higher level role play comes from bad DMs teaching him bad things about Roleplaying and that he could use someone to spend some time unteaching him the bad things he's been taught.

For example, yes, a lot of toxic players will try to use any excuse they can to exploit the trust of other players and so some hide behind Roleplaying to be jerks to their fellow players. In non-toxic games, players that intend to play the role of betrayal or an untrustworthy ally usually obtain AT LEAST the DM's consent ahead of time and they usually get the whole table's consent unless the secrecy is critical to the betrayal arc. At that point, if it all falls apart, the DM can still take responsibility for making a bad call allowing something that just didn't work as planned. But the point is that it should never be possible to hide being a jerk to your fellow players behind roleplaying because you shouldn't be doing it at all unless you know point blank that they are open to that kind of element in the game.

To draw from MMOs, PVP isn't for everyone. Some people just don't like that kind of game, and you certainly shouldn't derail the game they want to be having to impose a game they didn't want or expect. It's not wrong to play a jerk character that is different from yourself; it's wrong to try to excuse yourself playing in ANY style that takes away the fun of your fellow players. And this is what I'm talking about when I say, "unteaching angry DM." He's been taught that people who want to play jerk characters are just trying to excuse being jerks to the people across the table. I would tend to agree in the case of people who surprise others with it and resist efforts to change their behavior. This is not a problem of roleplaying jerk characters, but being a jerk player.

And that's precisely why I dislike trying to pidgeonhole Roleplaying into Self-Insertion. When the only person you can roleplay is yourself, if your character ever has a moment of weakness and does something bad, then YOU did something bad and you should feel bad. In actuality, you should only feel bad if you've acted in bad faith with the people at your table to have your fun at the expense of theirs. If they wouldn't like a betrayal scenario, then you don't play that scenario with those people and save it for people who find that kind of game fun.

[Quertus]

Hmmm... Lots of sub threads here. My 2 cp: talking involves lots of decisions, which can therefore involve role-playing. Combat includes lots of decisions, which can therefore involve role-playing. Character creation involves lots of decisions... which I guess therefore could involve role-playing? Role-playing involves making the decision as the character, from the character's PoV.

Choosing who to heal in combat - hmmm, that sounds like something combat medics have to do all the time, choosing whose injuries to prioritize. Do they always get it right? Probably not. But I expect that they get it right, eh, close enough to, say, the odds of a 3e D&D character making a DC 15 Heal check to not break my immersion / verisimilitude / whatever over it.

Simply making a decision isn't roleplaying. You have to use your imagination, try and pretend what if you were your character, make choices and execute actions like them. Don't look at where you want the game to go. Look at what your character's long-term desires are.

FTFY. I don't know about your experiences, but, IME, most humans are at least as driven by their short-term desires as their long-term plans.

Your advice is more ''how to play a role playing game'', not how to role play.

To role play you want to pretend that you are the character 100%. You, quite literal, want to play the role of another person. Hence the word.

And note, if your thinking about the mechanics of the game: your roll playing, not role playing.

And if your thinking about the game in real life as you make decisions for a character, you are metagaming.

Very concise and well put. You may deserve the award for the most content per character in this thread. However, that doesn't stop me from disagreeing about your definition of "roll playing". By which I mean, if I'm playing a combat medic in, say WWII, I don't want to be given all the gory details of the injuries on the battlefield to do my triage ala Saving Private Ryan. Nor do I want the OOC information of the mechanical wound levels. No, what I want is the results of my First Aid / Heal / Triage / whatever skill roll(s), and as much or as little detail of what that knowledge and those injuries mean as is appropriate to the table.

Because I am not a trained combat medic. I can't personally process all those injuries to accurately assess what treatment to give to what soldier, and in which order. But my character can - somewhat, in accordance with his stats and skills. That's what they're there for. So I want to use those stats and skills to determine what my character understand about the world, so as to correctly roleplay them. Because that's what they're there for.

[Tanarii]

Simply making a decision isn't roleplaying. You have to use your imagination, try and pretend what if you were your character, make choices and execute actions like them. Don't look at where you want the game to go. Look at what your character's long-term desires are.

That is not required. You were doing great, but you went off the rails at the end. You wandered off into a sub-set of roleplaying. It's my favorite one personally, the type of roleplaying where you imagine a character distinct from yourself, and flesh out their personality. It's the one most people in TRPGs do. But it's not the core of roleplaying.

Simply making a decision isn't roleplaying. You have to use your imagination, try and pretend a character is in the fantasy environment, make choices and execute actions for what the character will do in that environment.

The character doesn't have to be anyone other than your own personality if you don't want it to be. They don't have to have goals other than your own. You can totally play an RPG about what would happen if you were transported to the fantasy environment. Alternatively and fairly commonly, you can totally play an RPG in which you don't make a special attempt to figure out who the character is personality wise, just roll up some stats and then start doing stuff in the game, making decisions based without any consideration of an alternate personality to yourself, but still considering the character an entity in the fantasy environment and acting accordingly.

The key here is they are some character in the fantasy environment. This is what distinguishes a game of chess or checkers from RPGs, be the free form like D&D or almost tactical board games like Gloomhaven. To use two opposite extremes of kinds of RPGs.

It is possible to play RPGs like Gloomhaven or the WoTC D&D 'board' games or CRPGs, ones that emphasize specific responses and are GM-less, either with or without roleplaying. As that matters is if you're imagining the character in the fantasy environment, and making decisions based on that.

Similarly it is possible to play a game of Warhammer RPG or Battletech RPG or Robotech/Rifts RPG some versions of D&D as something akin to an actual board game, with no attempt to imagine a character in the fantasy environment and make decisions based on that. But rather as a playing piece constrained purely by the rules.

Yeah, no. I call BS.

The only thing that's BS is metagaming. Metagaming requires going out of your way to find explanations that don't allow the abstract rules to be reflected somehow in game.

[ImNotTrevor]

Metagaming is fine. We all do it. All the time.

Especially those of us trying to say that the tactics minigame is roleplaying by virtue of making decisions as a character.

We know what we, the player, want to do. So we come up with a reason why the character wpyld choose this. Backwards reasoning like this is so easy as to be reflexive. I didn't think I did this until I actually tried to pay attention to my own thought processes and, sure enough, yes I was. Often.

There's nothing wrong with that. Hell, we metagame all the time. Even in our urge to roleplay faithfully, we all know that some things will not fly, even if our characters would totally do it. Because we aren't the only player at the table. That's metagaming.

Whenever you consider stats as part of the equation, metagaming.

Whenever you wonder what the DM is thinking and try to figure that out and have the character do something, metagaming.

And that's fine. The stigma around metagaming is infantile and stupid. We're playing a game. We're all sitting around a table. Nobody is unaware of this. Playing the game like a game is OK. Because it's a GAME. That G is at the end of RPG for a reason.

And roleplaying is playing a role. It's pretending to be someone else. If the thing you're doing counts as pretending to be someone else without stretching it, bam. Playing a role. Roleplaying. 99% of it is actor stuff. (I do theater, and it helps my roleplaying. And vice versa.) Talking, motioning, desires, goals.

Emotionless tactics-bot #9 is, I guess, technically roleplaying? But is about as interesting as Edward Cullen as characters go. Flat, boring, etc.

"But my character wants to not die above all things!"

Uhuh. You've made a good retroactive character design to explain the behavior. Stiiiiiill boring.

[RazorChain]

A Guide on How to Roleplay

Make decisions for your character in the fantasy environment.

Seriously, that's all there is to it.

I'd say:

Making decisions as your character in a imaginary environment

because I can make a decisions for a hunk of cheese.....is that roleplaying....guiding that hunk of cheese through obstacles?

[2D8HP]

This book is dedicated to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, who first opened Pandora's box,
and to Ken St. Andre who found it could be opened again.

(Arneson & Gygax were the creators of Dungeons & Dragons -published 1974, Andre of Tunnels &Trolls -published 1975).

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS A FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAME?
A role-playing game is a game of character
development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called "life". The player acts a role in a fantasy environment, just as he might act a role in s play. In fact, when played with just paper and pencil on the game board of the player's imagination, it has been called "improvisational radio theatre. " If played with metal and plastic figurines, it becomes improvisational puppet theatre. However it is played, the primary purpose is to have fun.

“If I want to do that,” he said, “I’ll join an amateur theater group.” (see here)

.

[Darth Ultron]

Very concise and well put. You may deserve the award for the most content per character in this thread. However, that doesn't stop me from disagreeing about your definition of "roll playing".

Well, to me Roll Playing is reducing the otherwise Role Playing Game to the bare bones of just the dull and direct rules. It's playing like a Board Game or a Video Game.

Like take the Medic example.

Role Playing is where the player will act out the role of the Medic: Joe Smith. So the player comes up with a personality for Joe, and then role plays that. And everything the player does will be based upon their role playing of Medic Smith. So if the player decides Medic Smith is a ''save everyone(except himself) type'', then they will role play the character as that type. So, for example, if Medic Smith sees a wounded person, he will use his last bandage on them to help.

Roll Playing is where the player is just playing by the numbers, but is often ''pretending'' to the others in the group as being the above. The wounded person has 20 hit points and only took 5 points of damage, so using a 'full heal bandage'' would be a waste of 15 points. So the player will, roboticaly, be like ''I ignore the wounded person''. And sure, it's a ''smart'' decision...if your Roll Playing.

[KillianHawkeye]

The only thing that's BS is metagaming. Metagaming requires going out of your way to find explanations that don't allow the abstract rules to be reflected somehow in game.

Except your character doesn't have any "abstract rules" telling them whether or not a character is going to die next turn or 5 or 6 turns later. There are some specific ways of getting that information, like magic or examining them with the Heal skill or equivalent, but the most common way is for the player to tell the other players that they're about to die and then the healer metagames to wait until only when it's absolutely necessary to heal them.

But if you really thought that metagaming was BS, you wouldn't be calling it roleplaying.

[Tanarii]

😂😂😂

Yeah, I used to be grumpy about amateur acting being held up by elitists as One-True-Way Roleplaying too. Especially during the TSR era.

But it is kinda fun. Figuring out an alternate personality, then immersing yourself in it to the point you're almost method acting, in the process of imagining a character in an imaginary environment. Also eventually I found some rare people that can do funny voices right: entertaining but in a way that enhances immersion, as opposed to distracting from it.

But neither character personality immersion nor funny voices nor other kinds of amateur theatrics define roleplaying. They're just stuff layered on top of it.

Edit: I consider bad funny voices de rigueur for a popcorn-and-dice Orc-hunt type game.

Edit2:
Rereading that, clearly I should have written my OP definition of how to roleplay as:
imagine a character in the fantasy environment, and make decisions for them.

[Darth Ultron]

But neither character personality immersion nor funny voices nor other kinds of amateur theatrics define roleplaying. They're just stuff layered on top of it.

Well, acting out a role defines role playing...and that is ''character personality immersion ''. If your not pretending to be the role of someone else, then your not even role playing.