Questions tagged [roleplaying]
For questions specifically relating to the process of depicting a character in an RPG. Do not use as a general marker for any question.
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What is role-playing, and where do I start?
I have been told that roleplaying is great fun. I've looked and looked and it all seems so complicated. Could anyone tell me a good place to start, and what sort of things you end up doing in ...
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How do you help players not focus on the rules?
Background — My Group's Gaming Style
When I GM, I run games loosely from a rules standpoint, and do not feel bound to adhere to what the rulebook says when it doesn't make sense in a given situation. ...
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How do I roleplay a character more intelligent than I am?
What are some strategies and techniques for role playing a character that is more intelligent than you actually are? It's pretty easy to pretend to be someone who is less intelligent, but the reverse ...
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How to introduce and encourage role playing in non-roleplayers?
I'm going to be hosting a game at the end of the month. Myself, I am a semi-experienced DM but I will be playing with those who know only the basic mechanics of the game or have never roleplayed ...
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How do you deal with a player that's determined to play the game in a way that is detrimental to the advancement of the story?
I GM a Dresden Files campaign, and I have a first time role-player that has become a problem in terms of advancement of the story. At first I chalked it up to inexperience, but its become more and ...
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How can I play dumb?
I have a half-ogre character at my local larp group, and one of the roleplay-enforced restrictions for half-ogres is that they have low intelligence. I often find myself biting my tongue not to say '...
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How do I transition my players from roll-playing to role-playing?
The context for this question is the same as this related question about spending time in town, but I am looking for sufficiently different advice so I thought it warranted its own question.
I've ...
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How can I effectively decrease metagaming and increase player immersion?
This question is posed in a great way over on the Paizo boards, where I hang out since I play/run a lot of Pathfinder. Immersion is one of the key parts of the RPG experience to me, so I loved the ...
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How do I emphasize role-playing during combat?
Right now, the group that I GM for is very, very tactical-combat focused. To some extent, we may as well be playing a dungeon crawl board game for all the role-play we manage.
Now, in and of itself ...
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As a man, how can I roleplay a woman better?
I rarely play characters of the opposite sex, and I find that I'm not very good at it, at least in my own estimation. This is hampering when I GM because it limits my range, and makes things hard ...
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Is there a way to ask in game (i.e. in a non-meta way) what a character's class is?
Is there a way to ask in game (i.e. in a non-meta way) what a character's class is? There have been a few times when my character is meeting an NPC (allied combatant) or another PC and it's bugging me ...
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What are some of the major challenges in playing an Evil Character? [closed]
What are some of the major challenges in playing an Evil Character (whether that's a formal alignment or not) in a co-operative party game, and likewise, what are some of the reasons many groups ...
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How should a GM deal with sexuality in an RPG?
I think it's a matter of fact that since the first moment a player realizes that he or she can interact with someone of the opposite sex romantically within the game, things get hairy. I had my fair ...
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How do you handle verbal exchanges between NPCs without taking the PCs out of the spotlight?
One of the assumptions I make as GM is that the players should always be in the spotlight. Sometimes the players find themselves in a situation where they watch NPCs speak to each other. I don't ...
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As a girl how can I roleplay a male character better?
I am one who wants to play both female and male characters. Up until now I have played two male characters but only for small quests (5 sessions max). At the moment we are playing "Shackled City" and ...
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What is a good way to become a better NPC/monster actor?
One of the biggest problems I have as Game Master, (going on 30+yrs) is in portraying NPC and Monsters in any RPG. Is there a good resource for becoming a better 'actor'?
Instead of just saying... ...
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Roleplaying a Dragon Better
So I'm DMing a very Dragon-Heavy campaign that my friend gave me, but I seem to have trouble roleplaying dragons. I don't want to stop the campaign and find a new one because I'm having difficulty ...
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How can I encourage my D&D Encounters group to do more role playing?
I'm a new player to D&D 4e. I've been participating in D&D Encounters since Season 1 and have even run a couple of sessions in Season 3 when the regular DM couldn't attend. I don't play in ...
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How to get the players to care and RP more?
About two month ago I got interested in D&D and I decided to start playing it. I read the rules, found an adventure and got four of my friends to play with me. They always show up to play and we ...
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How to deal with a player who is a bad sport?
I have a dedicated gaming group that meets every Sunday. We have been playing regularly for over a year now. It's small, just 5 of us including the current DM. We all rotate DM position per campaign ...
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How can I roleplay a character more manipulative than myself?
In a game of Maids RP (don't laugh) right now, I'm playing a character significantly more 'cunning' than me.
I don't have a problem playing intelligent characters - I consider myself fairly smart, ...
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How can I roleplay my evil character properly?
I have started playing as an evil character in a group of neutral and good characters. We are traveling in a caravan through an undead-ridden world. No teleportation or plane traveling possible.
We ...
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Tried all the existing advice, but players still never roleplay fear
I've read some other posts on here about how to telegraph danger to my PCs and how to make them flee. The problem is, I believe I am actively using all the strategies in both of the posts and my PCs ...
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How to encourage a player's creativity without breaking the game?
I've just started a new D&D 4e campaign with a new group of players. One of my players came straight from 2nd edition, and has never played 4e before. She doesn't seem to grasp the layer of ...
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Creating emotions
In the group that I GM, I ran an adventure a few months back that was generally considered very good by everyone involved (Including myself, which does not happen often). It included a little girl ...
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How to voice an NPC?
As a GM should I use a different voice for a NPC who is, for instance, a sick old man, or if it's a kid, or even a member of the opposite sex? What advice can you give me to enrich NPC acting?
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How can I motivate my fellow players?
Although I'm very much enjoying the one of the games I'm in, the other players seem to be flagging and losing interest. This is a bit disheartening as their lack of enthusiasm is bringing down the ...
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How can I roleplay multiclassing to explain new class features?
A nice broad question to set the scene
I'm fairly new to roleplaying and I'm struggling with a valid reasons for both why and how a character would multiclass into another class independently - that ...
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How do I roleplay a character with a large disparity between their intelligence and wisdom?
This question is tangential to the (good) question how to role-play an intelligent character.
Say you have a system that differentiates between intelligence and wisdom (dd4.0 being the obvious ...
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Up to which point does narrative/roleplaying affect mechanics?
I want to share something that happened a few weeks ago, which I am still wondering about.
There were two events:
In the first time, in a dungeon, we found several imp-like creatures on a room with ...
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How do I deal with my players not roleplaying at all? [duplicate]
I know I should "let them have fun" or something, but the game isn't really working.
I'm GMing a pathfinder campaign, but this isn't system-dependent. My players aren't roleplaying at all. Ok, they ...
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What is the Stormwind Fallacy?
In the context of another Question here, the Stormwind Fallacy was brought up. What exactly is the Stormwind Fallacy and how is connected to optimization?
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Why wouldn’t I just run away from the eldritch horror?
I am struggling with character motivations in Call of Cthulhu or similarly investigative horror settings. For some reason I seem to have issues imagining the reasoning behind characters who really ...
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How to maximize the opportunities of roleplaying military rank in a PC group, while minimizing the limitations on the players
Some games come with a predisposition toward the characters having military rank. This is typically an element of the setting material, and is intended to aid immersion, and produce interesting social ...
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Are there concrete advantages for being proficient at social skills in a table that rewards roleplaying these interactions?
I'm a new DM running D&D 5e's LMoP with a small group of new players.
So far everyone is having fun even though we're all learning on the fly, which I think is great. But there have been ...
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How can you encourage players to portray a "realistic" reaction to in-game stressful/traumatic circumstances?
This question came to me while I was thinking about killing people in pen-and-paper rpgs.
When a character starts his career, in most systems, he is somewhat young. As an example, when you are first ...
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How to avoid "My Guy" syndrome while roleplaying a flawed character? [closed]
Related: What is "my guy syndrome" and how do I handle it?
A while ago, I ran into an interesting conflict in a game that got me thinking.
I was playing in a party with a Knight/Paladin ...
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How to run an encounter where PCs have different observations of the same events?
Some of the discussion in this question got me to thinking about an encounter design that sounded fun but I couldn't figure out an elegant way to pull it off:
In some situation where one or more PCs ...
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How do you deal with a player slowing the group because of indecisiveness/excessive RP?
The campaign is set in an open world, giving the players lots of freedom, including the option to split up.
This specific player was unfortunate enough to become plagued with a terrible illness, and ...
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Role playing with powers, solely for the effect without damage
Certain abilities have very interesting effects, but are accompanied by damage. In combat, this is no problem. But say you want to use the ability outside of combat, for role-playing reasons.
Can you ...
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What is a good way to explain the difference between a Chaotic Neutral character, and a character who is just crazed? [closed]
When I first started playing with a group of completely new players, one of the first things I did was to explain the alignments as best I could at the time. When describing Chaotic Neutral, my exact ...
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How can I encourage role playing in a custom setting?
Since creating a fully living and breathing world for the players to inhabit is a time-consuming process, I have been feeding them background info as often as possible as it is relevant to the story. ...
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Our GM won't let us affect the story; the more I play the less fun I have. What do I do?
I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice or anything on a GM situation.
My current GM is running a campaign and it is very video game/anime like. It started out super fun and the deeper ...
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Handling a character who frequently pickpockets teammates
I am a DM for a small group. One of the players has a very sneaky dwarf from a criminal background and chaotic neutral alignment. The problem is he keeps pick pocketing his Elvish teammates, saying ...
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How do I avoid clichés while improvising?
Tropes are not bad, but clichés usually are. Sadly, when I need to come up with something on the fly it's much easier and faster to use clichés: if I suddenly need a barkeep, he's probably fat with a ...
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As DM, how do I deal with PCs that expect everything in the game to be relevant to the story?
I've started DMing a new group. We've only had two short, 2hour sessions, and most players are new to DnD. I've been a DM before (though just a dozen or so sessions) but in those cases it was with a ...
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Creating the personality of a character different from myself
I am a newbie in playing role-playing games, and after several games, I've come to the conclusion that character personality creation poses a bit of a problem for me.
I mostly tend to create and ...
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Does roleplaying inherently put you at a disadvantage?
My friend is going to be DMing DnD 3.5 with me and 4 other new players. I want to be the best player I can be.
One thing I have always struggled with is roleplaying. I am an analytical, competitive ...
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Players Develop Backstories Too Much
I keep running into an issue as a dungeon master where my players develop their characters a bit too much. By this, I mean that they'll write up things in their backstories or develop NPCs that aren't ...
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How do I get better at narrating/storytelling as a GM?
Personally, I've always had difficulty telling coherent stories, even from my own experiences. My wife has even coined a term (jokingly) for the type of story I tell, one that either makes no sense, ...
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