Descriptions Over Dice: Roleplay Character Actions Before You Roll Play

Hello! Nerditor Doug here to welcome guest posters from Dork Forge to the Nerdarchy family. Dork Forge are “a righteous, funny, and super humble group of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventurers with killer memes.” The folks at Dork Forge stream games live on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. central on Twitch, with VOD on YouTube. They also have their own website with articles and video archives. This post comes to us from Dork Forge co-founder and Dungeon Master Tom Ball. Tom tackles a great topic that can trip up a lot of players from veterans to those new to the RPG hobby — how to roleplay character actions when the player themselves isn’t an expert. Using description in front of rolling those dice can enrich a character’s actions when it comes time to make that crucial check.

Roleplay before your roll play

By Tom Ball, Dork Forge

We’ve all been there. Your cantankerous dwarven druid gives a fantastic enraged speech warning the Carpenters’ Guild to stay out of his forest… Only to realize he’s got a -2 to Intimidation. Maybe you’re the cleric who dumped Intelligence, so doesn’t really know anything about the god she serves.

Rolling a skill check on a minus stat isn’t much fun. While we all know the advice “negatives make for better roleplaying,” and for the most part we agree, it still sucks when you roll badly on your skill checks. As a DM, it’s my job to make sure my players have fun at the table (within reason; I’m also sort of trying to kill them). After having a think, I came up with a solution that might help players engage a bit more with those negative skills.

Say one of your players enjoys diplomacy (cherish them) but they don’t really have the stats to back it up — Charisma was a dump stat, so they try and avoid getting involved in discussions that might end with a Persuasion check. Instead of relegating them to the sidelines, ask them to describe in detail exactly what they do.

In my own group — Dork Forge’s The Vindicators — one player enjoys nothing more than intimidating his enemies within the corrupt Mage’s Guild for information, but his intimidation modifier is lackluster. When I asked him to describe exactly how he intimidates the guard he’s kidnapped, he describes following them for a week beforehand in his downtime, trying to learn their secrets and flaws to use against them.

Awesome.

Make that intimidation roll, but use Intelligence (+4) instead of Charisma (-2). The player still has a -2 in Intimidation, so you take that off at the end, but they now have a respectable +2 to the roll. It could still go wrong. Maybe he followed the wrong guard all week, or maybe the way he threatens the guard falls flat when he trips over his words, but the player feels like they’ve got more agency than they did before.

I’m not saying do this for every roll (that would be insane), and the player needs to be convincing in their argument (they can’t just use Dexterity because they’re a rogue and they want to), but ultimately it can help players flesh out their characters, and immerse them even more fully in the world you’re creating for them —and isn’t that really what you’re there to do as a DM?

For more outside-the-box DMing, subscribe to our Newsletter and RSS feed at the Dork Forge, but before you go, comment below on a favorite outside-the-box tool you’ve encountered in DMing.

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