Being a better player

I don’t think I’m very good at playing roleplaying games.

I think I’m a good GM (although you shouldn’t take my word for it), but playing? I need all the help I can get. So here are the things I do to improve my roleplaying skillz.

Better roleplaying

A selection of RPGs that (mostly)
don't tell you how to roleplay

I don’t think I’m very good at roleplaying. Most of the time, my approach to roleplaying is to play myself (or a version of myself) but set in another world. It’s okay, but it could be better.

And RPGs themselves aren't much help. They're noticeably short on advice on how to actually roleplay.

The Angry GM has some help here. I rather like The Angry GM. He’s a bit ranty (okay, he’s very ranty) but is never dull and always has something worth saying. He talks a lot about D&D, but that’s okay as what he says often applies to other games.

In a recent post, The Angry GM talks about how to play a character. To save you the 3000-word rant (which is good but long), he suggests (via a Star Trek Trill analogy) that to roleplay your character, you need only to come up with a ‘seed’ and give them motivation.

Then you ask yourself: ‘What would I do if I was a role with a motivation?’

There, roleplaying.

That’s not the first time The Angry GM has talked about roleplaying. In this post, he talks about two-note characters, in which you choose a motivation (ie as above, but he’s provided a list this time) and a colourful character detail.

So combining them both gives us:

• A role
• A motivation
•  A colourful character detail

You take that and over time you will settle into your character, and you’ll do it without thinking about it. (I don’t think I’ll ever reach that stage—I like variety too much.)

I like this. It’s short enough for me to remember, it’s system-agnostic, so I can use it anywhere, and hopefully it gives me enough to work with.

Putting it into practice

So recently I was playing in Tales from the Loop. The kid playbooks give you a good start for most of this. I am playing Slash:

• Role: 14-year-old boy
• Motivation: Trying to impress a girl
• Detail: Guns N’ Roses fan

I wrote ‘What would I do if I was a 14-year-old boy trying to impress a girl' at the top of my character sheet to remind me how to play Slash.

Take risks: play like an NPC

Sometimes, as a player, I get to play NPCs. Occasionally, when my character is absent from a scene, the GM has an NPC to hand I can play.  When playing NPCs, I take more risks, mistreat them, insult other characters…

Sometimes, I can play my characters a little too safely, and I have to remind myself to play my character as if they are an NPC.

(This differs from playing NPCs as a GM. As a GM, my NPCs serve the story and I’m concentrating on too many other things to play them particularly well. As a player, I can have fun with NPCs because I care less about their fate.)

So as a player I need to remind myself to take risks and play like an NPC.

Wrapping up

So all I need to remember is:

• What would I do if I was a role with a motivation?’
• Act like an NPC

If I can do that, then that should make me a better player. And maybe if I do it enough it will become second nature.