Gnomecast #243 – Getting Them to Roleplay

[laughs] Moving on into our main topic, we're all here for role-playing games.

That is an absolute given, but the depth to which players dive into the role-playing aspect of these games can vary from table to table.

Recent conversations about passive players and charismatic characters has made me wanna have a chat with my fellow gnomes about what we as GMs can do to encourage our players to get into their characters and role-play.

So let's dive in.

First up, what does it mean when we say we want our players to role-play? What are the specifics we're talking here?

here?It depends on what the table's comfortable with from a practical standpoint from where I'm coming at.

But I think, um, the, what we're trying to dig at here is, like, getting into character, acting a little more, you know, speaking in character instead of, um, just saying, "I, I roll to attack." But taking on the R-O-L-E, the role, of the character in the role-playing game.

Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting because before you kinda made the comment about how do we get them to talk in character, and it's like sometimes I'm not even worried about that.

It's...

I had a player one time, he was very kind of closed off.

He played a lot of, like, Pathfinder, and when he played Pathfinder it was very mechanical.

He was trying to get, you know, this to work, get really upset when his die rolls didn't work because he did this feat with that spell and it should've done this.

And I got him in my DC Adventures game, and he didn't talk a lot in person, but he did start framing things from the mindset of his character.

He started not just looking at his character saying, "This power did this and I rolled this," but actually kind of thinking about, "Okay, if I was a guy that was stationed at the North Pole doing wilderness observation before I got my powers, how would I react to these things?" And it was just really, really interesting to see him kind of move more into that mindset where he is at least describing things from the mindset of, "I think I would do this because this."

In modern days, kind of the gold standard of what people think of as role-playing is, like, Critical Role, where you have these professional voice actors acting as their characters and giving you entertainment that is deep storytelling while also still framed around a role-playing game.

I don't think any of us here are actually expecting that level of skill and voice acting and role-playing at our tables, but I do want the players to have their characters have conversations with each other that are not just discussing tactics about what to do next and how to do... and all the minutia of the game part of our role-playing games.

And it is very easy for some games, especially that are a little more gamified, like, I- I get like D&D.

It is very easy to play a D&D game without ever acting as your character.

You know, you just discuss how your, your character's traveling through the wilderness with the other players, when you're camping, when you're doing this.

You get in the dungeon, "Um, check for traps," and there's these points where there's no role-playing.

There's no in-character interactions, and it's the in-character interactions that I really want to see more out of players.

I have also had, um, a time where I was running for a group of newbies.

I was running for my niece and her friends when they were all still in high school.

There wasn't a whole lot of role-playing among them because they were all very new, they're all teens, it's all a little kind of awkward, and it took a little bit to get them to the point.

Now, all of them were storytellers.