Writing and Acting as Essential Roleplayer Skills
Opinion: If you want to be a good roleplayer, you need to know how to write, and you need to know how to act. You don’t have to be an absolute master of those disciplines, but you should at least know the fundamentals. You need to know something about how to plot, and how to structure a story. Beginning, middle, end. Foreshadowing. Closure. You need to understand character motivations, identify emotional hooks and proper emotional responses, know what feels right for any particular character to do in any given situation.
Game systems exist only to offer structure, define (and limit) possibilities, enforce genre rules, and provide a means for conflict resolution. That’s a lot. Story and character are not mechanical functions. Yes, games have character sheets that offer up information about the character, but that’s not who the character is, it’s a guideline as best. It doesn’t define their reactions, their hopes, dreams, triumphs, tragedies. That’s all you. A game can provide some guidelines on how to design encounters, even lay out the beats, but it doesn’t provide the emotions that drive the story — love, hate, revenge, honor, greed, all those messy emotions that fire the machinations of villains and the ambitions of heroes.
Story and plot are conscious choices, decisions you make. They may be influenced by dice or other randomized information, but the interpretation of that data is a choice. The villain doesn’t kidnap the princess because he’s “evil”. He kidnaps the princess because he needs to sacrifice her to a demon in return for power, or because he lusts after the princess. His motivations are power, or sex. He chooses his methodologies because he’s evil, and operates under a different code of ethics and morality. The paladin might lust after the princess too, but that’s a whole other conflict.
It doesn’t matter what books you read on the topics of writing and acting, so long as they work for you and offer up some sort of advice you can use. Listen to DVD commentaries on your favorite films and shows to see why the people involved made the creative choices they did. Watch interviews with actors and directors about their craft. Read interviews with writers. Talk to those sorts of people when you can. Talk to really good gamemasters and roleplayers about the choices they made on story and plot. Developing these skills, as both a gamemaster and a player, will result in a far more rewarding roleplaying experience.
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