Getting Players into Character: 4 Strategies

About six months ago, I started running a campaign for my new gaming group. When the night of the first session finally arrived, I made an awkward discovery.

It all started when in the first few minutes of the session the PCs were approached by a chatty carriage driver sent to collect them from a rail station. When I spoke to them as the carriage driver, they just blinked at me. What followed was a mix of halting responses and awkward attempts to paraphrase what they wanted their characters to say.

One of my players, (who is ironically a semi-professional actor in real life,) actually stopped the session and said, “I’m really sorry. We just haven’t done much of this sort of thing before.” It could have been a disaster.

But it wasn’t. By the end of the first game session, nobody was paraphrasing their dialogue, and by the time the campaign was over ten sessions later, they were all enthusiastically and unselfconsciously playing their roles in character. It was a huge success, but it could have gone the other way.

Although there is no “wrong way to game” if everyone is having a good time, active in-character roleplaying can make the experience more engaging. But there are barriers. For one thing, active roleplaying can “feel silly” at first. After all, Adults new to tabletop RPGs might not have engaged in this sort of “pretend play” since they were children, while those who have mostly played combat oriented tactical games might just not realize that anyone besides the gang on Critical Role does this sort of thing. What’s more, they might worry that they won’t be good at it.

As long as you, the GM, are comfortable with improvisational acting yourself, it isn’t hard to get your players past these obstacles. I have found the following four strategies to be hugely effective for getting hesitant players into character.

1: Model in character roleplaying with active NPCs

The only way for hesitant players to become comfortable with active roleplaying is to do it. This means your NPCs need to consistently engage them in back-and-forth dialogue that requires sustained in-character roleplaying.

Write scenarios that PCs to cajole, trick, or persuade complex NPCs. Consider adding an NPC with whom the party members must build a relationship in order to accomplish something essential. Maybe they need to earn the trust of a shy fifteen-year-old princess so that she will ask her father to grant them a special privilege, or perhaps a washed up wizard with a drinking problem needs to be rehabilitated in order to perform the rite that will open the gateway to Annwn. What is important is that the characters engage the NPCs in order to accomplish a goal that the players care about.

2: Don’t punish inexperience; reward participation instead.

Hesitant players attempting to roleplay actively for the first time may falter in their speech, be slow to respond, and often use vocabulary that their characters would not know. Ignore these imperfections. Have your NPCs react as though the PC was as charming, funny, or clever, he or she was attempting to be. If you are using a game system that has robust rules for determining social outcomes, use those systems, but try and ensure that your players can have some early success to help them build confidence.

What you absolutely should not do is try to “help” players improve by having NPCs respond to a player’s use of obviously out-of-world-vocabulary with confusion. (I regret that I used to do this when I was teenager.) This sort of thing will only make hesitant players even more self-conscious.

 3: Know when to stop.

Although active roleplaying can enrich your games, it is important to know when to paraphrase social encounters instead of acting them out. Generally speaking, it is a good idea to actively roleplay scenes that have one or more of the following qualities. 1) the scene is important for the character development of a key NPC. 2) The scene is important for developing an important aspect of the setting or to establish the right mood. 3) the scene involves a social conflict that will have a meaningful effect on the direction of the narrative.

If a scene has none of those qualities, it is probably fine to paraphrase it unless the players want to act it out. You may also want to paraphrase all or parts of scenes that exclude one or more of your players; you should definitely paraphrase scenes that your players are obviously bored by. Hitchcock once said, “what is drama, but life with the dull bits cut out.”

4: Foster three-dimensional characters

Players will have a much easier time roleplaying their characters actively if those characters have rich backgrounds and three dimensional personalities. Encourage players to spend at least as much time writing a character background before the first game as they do creating a character sheets. Backgrounds should address not only a character’s history, but also her personality. Consider having player answer a few of these questions from Deborah Chester’s excellent book about writing fantasy fiction:

1) What are this character’s primary personality traits? (At least three should be positive, at least one negative.)

2) How does this character’s surface behavior contrast with her true nature?

3) How did this character develop her belief system or personal code?

4) What is this character’s primary life goal?

5) What makes this character laugh?

You might also have players make a list of the three social tactics this character typically uses to get what he or she wanting. These shout be expressed as specific –“ing” verbs like “flattering,” “jesting,” “praising,” “lying,” “whining,” “commanding,” “shaming,” etc. Verbs like “manipulating” should be off limits because they are too vague. Instead choose verbs that show us how you character manipulates others.

As a game master you might also want to take a similar approach to designing key NPCs.

One last thing: If you are running a campaign rather than a one-off game, discourage players from constructing characters around a gimmick. A Halfling nudist obsessed with arson might be a great choice for a one-off, but in campaign play such a character is likely to become repetitive and boring at best, and annoying to the other players at worst.

Feel free to add some suggestions of your own in the comments section.