Roleplaying Advice - Act and Narrate
I read this quick piece on Bastionland about how to roleplay an NPC, and it snapped a bit of experience I have with roleplaying into place - that place being the format of some simple advice I can put into a blogpost.
The advice mostly doesn’t have anything to do with Bastionland’s post. In fact, my advice isn’t even just limited to NPCs - players can make good use of it too. Consider this one as an extra player advice blogwagon submission! It is also something maybe most of you out there are already doing intuitively. But it never hurts to take conscious notice of a good technique.
Anyway, my advice is quite simple: intersperse third-person narration of a character’s actions in the middle of roleplaying them in first-person.
The idea here is to take advantage of the benefits of each one of these two different modes of roleplaying.
When roleplaying in the “first person” - i.e. saying the words that the character would say, gesticulating as they would, reacting and emoting as them - you turn yourself into a sort of “prop” that represents something in the fictional world more directly. You’re giving the other players a broader channel of information into this character, as opposed to the narrow channel of just what your words describe, which often heightens their attention and engagement on what you’re doing, as there is more information to decode than usual.
For example: if the PCs hit the mysterious masked vigilante on the shoulder the night before, and the GM roleplays the bartender rubbing the same side shoulder as they speak the next day, it is a rare opportunity to provide the players with an interesting clue that doesn’t require the GM to highlight it with a spoken description.
On the other hand, roleplaying in the “third person” - i.e. narrating their actions and what they’re saying from an external point of view, not trying to act as them - lets you escape the confines of your own acting skills. It lets you have your characters do things you’re not comfortable saying, doing or miming, or things you lack the physical capacity to do, or manipulate objects that aren’t there, or any number of other things that don’t fit the physical space of your gaming table, real or virtual. It’d be inconvenient to do a walk-and-talk scene by actively getting up and walking around while roleplaying, but easy enough to quickly describe.
It also lets you bring in the other players’ focus into something particular. Maybe if you yourself tried roleplaying a person blinking a morse-code message while they speak, the other players wouldn’t see it (to say nothing of the fact that you’d have to know how to blink in something at least approximating morse-code): your face might be poorly lit, you might be playing online with a video feed that is a bit laggy, etc. If you narrate that the character “is blinking a lot, in weird rhythmic patterns”, that is something that in principle everyone will hear and register (so long as they’re paying attention, which hopefully they are).
Better yet, narration allows you to direct information to player characters who have special insight due to specialized knowledge!
Quick sidenote: sometimes I get the impression that people generally undervalue how much framing the game’s narration around each character’s point-of-view adds to a game. Sure, in pragmatic terms you’re really giving the whole table the information, and saying that X character noticed something doesn’t necessarily give X’s player the spotlight.
In my experience, though, players usually appreciate having their character validated this way! Doesn’t matter if you’re acknowledging a mechanical option they’ve selected or a detail in their background - the fact that you’ve reinforced that this character is notable or defined by being able to perceive certain facets of the game world that others can’t is worth it in and of itself. Plus, for canny players, it sends an important signal: you won’t be getting this kind of info if this character isn’t there to perceive it, which makes their presence tactically meaningful!
Anyways, point is: since acting things out directly and narrating them from an external point-of-view each have their advantages, do both!
Act something out, and quickly describe some supplemental detail that your acting doesn’t cover. Describe some way in which the character does something far beyond what you could do, but in acting as them still make a gesture that reminds the other players that they’re still doing the thing.
Here’s another sidenote, on a more "advanced" point to aim toward when using this technique: avoid being overly redundant when doing the act + narrate combo. You don’t want to hit hackneyed overexplained prose territory when doing this, explaining all of your acting and acting out all of your narration. Good pacing is probably still more important than properly flourishing up your characterization!
Pick what’s important and appropriate for the scene, develop a feel for what is best left for one mode or another, and only repeat the information from one mode on the other when you want to highlight it or give the other players a quick reminder of that aspect of the character’s behavior!
Maybe this is a kind of obvious piece of advice, but I see enough people saying that they don’t do any “acting” roleplaying because they’re bad at it that I imagine this simple idea - that you can supplement your shortcomings as an actor with a bit of narration - maybe doesn’t cross everyone’s mind.
Of course, this is not to say you have to or should be doing this. Whatever you’re comfortable with is fine, whatever works for you is fine!
But a bit of theatrical flair - even bad theatrical flair - does add some good spice to a game! Presentation isn’t the most important thing out there, but it is always appreciated where you can put it.
So use this little technique to get a bit more out of any lacking thespian skills, and trust that even your poor performance generally makes the fiction a little bit more palpable and the game a bit more fun. If nothing else, you’ll be fostering an environment where people know they are allowed to act silly and look stupid, and that is already worth a lot!