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D&D Ideas — Roleplaying

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is roleplaying, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of roleplaying in Dinner Party after accidentally ingesting a Truth Serum Poison characters are embroiled in a long night of deception and revelation — a terrific scenario for exploring the roles each character plays in your game. You can get Nerdarchy the Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

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Delving Dave’s Dungeon

Roleplaying — it’s right in the name of our beloved hobby of tabletop roleplaying games but it can mean different things to different gamers and their gaming groups. It can mean using funny voices and always speaking in character but that is only one way of interpreting roleplaying. You can speak in third person and never use a character voice and still be roleplaying. As long as you take on the role of the character you are playing you are roleplaying. You can start with very basic premises to roleplaying during a game.

All the information on your character sheet in a game like 5E D&D become lenses through which to view the world and probably much differently than you yourself would deal with same situations. The main components of your character are race, background and class. These things define the sum of your characters’ experiences up to the point your game begins.

Race

The race into which your character was born and the culture they grew up in helps shape how they perceive the world. A dwarf who has grown up in a close knit clannish society beneath the earth might greet a stranger with suspicion and distrust. A halfling who grew up in a roaming caravan traveling from community to community may do the same with joy and exuberance. To the dwarf who grew up beneath the world in the Underdark a stranger represents the unknown and a potential threat. To the halfling the same stranger could be someone with whom to swap stories as a potential new friend.

The Underdark where dwarves build their strongholds is a dangerous and unforgiving environment with civilizations far and few between. It is a place where you are more likely to encounter threats than friends. The overly trusting don’t have a long life expectancy. For the roaming halfling caravan it’s the opposite. Fellow travelers and strangers on the road offer insights and information on what lies ahead. Both of these upbringings could produce an adventurer but those individuals are shaped very differently in their attitudes and how they view the world. When considering how you want to interact with a situation take a moment to consider what kind of response someone typical of your people would be. Does your character respond in this typical way or not?

Background

Your background is what or who you were before becoming an adventurer. Has this part of your character’s past carried over into how they interact with the world? A former soldier might be all about order and discipline. The first thing they do when awakening in the morning could be to make their bed, do morning exercises, get dressed and then have breakfast. They always awaken early because it’s what they are used to from their days in the military. The soldier who means a stranger could begin all interactions in very formal and regimented way until they can discern their station to each, because the soldier is used to a chain of command.

While a character with a performer background might be the opposite. They are used to sleeping in because they would perform into night and then carouse afterwards. They never bother to make their bed. Heck, perhaps it was even rare for them to ever make it back to their own bed if they fell asleep in a bed at all. A former entertainer meeting a stranger might set about trying to get the stranger to focus on them because they’ve had a hard time giving up the spotlight since becoming an adventurer.

Class

Fighters are trained in the art of war and martial prowess. They might constantly gauge the risk of those around them and how their martial prowess stacks up to the fighter’s own. The first thing a fighter might notice about a stranger is their weapons and armor. Do they have calluses on their hands from wielding weapons? Is their skin smooth or marked from battle?

Rogues are trained to find opportunities outside the confines of the law. They speak a secret language only other rogues know and use it to identify each other and to talk about things without others knowing the gist of their conversation. The rogue is more likely to understand the seedy side of society. As a rogue you might constantly be taking inventory of people and things. Are they assets, marks, the law or fellow ne’er-do-wells? When meeting a stranger the rogue might begin to discern the categories into which an individual belongs. Do they have anything of value? Goods and information are things in which rogues have learned to trade.

These are just examples of things to think about when your character interacts with the world. You might come up with how the typical person might act from the same circumstances as your character and decide your character generally does the opposite and has rejected those things from their past. Your alignment and equipment list could be another place to define how you roleplay your character. I’d suggest dissecting everything on your sheet and consider what they mean to the character you are playing. These are just some of the tools in your toolbox to incorporating roleplaying in your 5E D&D games.

From Ted’s Head

Dave and Doug made a lot of great points during the live chat. With so many play styles I rarely see anyone talk about what mechanical features would actually make for the most roleplaying character. Since roleplaying gets relegated to just talking it can easily get over looked but there are spells and feats that can be taken.

The top spells would be things that would either allow you to communicate with things that you could not communicate with or things that made you better at communicating. Spells like speak with plants, or speak with animals and especially tongues seriously open up the path to role playing with things that you might have missed the opportunity to talk to. But on the either side if you look at a simple spell friends it has some extra role playing in and enhance ability. Lets not forget speak with dead. So the bad guy would rather kill themself than talk to you, no worries this spell has your team covered.

When it comes to feats there are a load that get you access to either more skills or languages. Obviously having more skills can be directed any which way but focusing on charisma skills such as deception, persuasion and intimidation as well as Wisdom skills like insight will allow your character to pick up on more social queues and be better at getting the point of your communication off. Skilled, prodigy, skill expert, Linguist. There are also loads of options within just Eldritch adept. Yeah you can only take it once but, Eyes of the Rune Keeper lets you read all writing, for good or ill. This will certainly facilitate more role playing as you disseminate more information to the party. Beguiling Influence is just getting strait up access to more charisma skills and Beast Speech is going to get you the ability to talk to animals.

So go ahead. Make those choices that make your character better at role playing and conversing with the world around them. Yeah your DM might not be thrilled at the idea of voicing every squirrel and shrub within the world but perhaps it is a meaningful journey for you.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

I’m gonna lead off this week’s editorial about roleplaying in 5E D&D with the same point I made launching into our live chat — ROLEPLAYING IS NOT JUST SOCIAL INTERACTION. While I understand it’s become somewhat of an accepted common perspective it’s a hill I’ll die on most especially because hills are terrific defensive positions and odds of survival aren’t too shabby.

Over the weekend Nerdarchist Ted and I geeked out about the new Obi-Wan Kenobi show. We both agree whenever there’s a new Star Wars film or movie we inevitably want to do some tabletop roleplaying set in the world of galactic war, space wizards and seedy crime. When I was a kid I played a lot of West End Games’ Star Wars RPG and while I don’t recall many specifics I do remember my character type was Laconic Scout — a template predicated on not talking much. Does this mean it’s inherently anti-roleplaying? Of course not.

For me the roleplaying aspect of an RPG is akin to the craft of acting. Whether you invest something of yourself into a character or draw from your own creation and find a connecting thread with your own perspective the goal is bringing the character to life during your game. Even the most kick-in-the-door and kill the monsters for treasure characters develop some sort of worldview. What’s their motivation?

With decades of RPG experiences under my belt I still find new ways to enhance my own roleplaying all the time. A recent video from the Dungeon Craft channel where Professor Dungeon Master reviews the Knave RPG got me thinking about this. In the video he goes through the character creation process to demonstrate how quick and easy it is to generate a character. Part of this includes rolling on a few tables to determine personality traits. I thought about my own 5E D&D characters and how I always go through those steps as well — especially with the This Is Your Life section in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Whenever an RPG includes this sort of stuff I find it incredibly fun to generate this baseline personality and play from there.

I looked through all the 5E D&D characters I’ve played over the last few years to refresh myself on their personality traits and reflect on whether they emerged through roleplaying. I’m happy to say yes they were. Regardless of any particular group’s playstyle I get tremendous satisfaction from discovering how those traits come out and interact with whatever the circumstances of an adventure. In fact almost every time many of the most memorable moments of campaigns share a direct connection to roleplaying those traits.

The next time you get together with friends to embark on RPG adventures (and especially if you create a new character for a fresh start) take a moment to consider not the role they’ll play in the party as a whole but the role you’re stepping into as a player. Who is your character in the context of the world and what motivates them? I bet you’ll be happily surprised to find the experience enriched when you approach situations not exclusively from what your character can do mechanically but who they are personally.

*Featured image — Do characters have conflicting ideals or flaws? Do they have secrets? Do they have secret desires? If you thought your last holiday dinner was embarrassing, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because this could get messy. Dinner Party dives deep into roleplaying to discover the answers to these and more questions for your next game. Check out Out of the Box here.

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