Storytelling in Motion - What is Roleplaying

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As with all blogs, everything I write here is my opinion. I try to back it up with sound reasoning, but if you’re looking for a post that uses quotes from rulebooks or cites psychological papers to back things up, this isn’t the article series for you.

Additionally, while I do actively play DND 5e and FATE, I primarily come from a heavy MCRP (Minecraft RolePlay) background with a bit of forum/Discord/text RP mixed in, so much of this advice relates to RP environments that border closer to LARPing than to traditional TTRPGs. The closest tabletop analogue to this sort of RP environment might be West Marches campaigns, though I’ve never participated in one so that assumption is largely based on description of the system, not experience.

Because of this unique background, I may use different terms to refer to common ideas. I’ll try to point them out in this author’s note section on each article as such terms come up. For this article, you’ll see the term “storyteller” crop up - wherever you see this term, you can imagine this being replaced with dungeonmaster/gamemaster or any similarly analogous term.

I enjoy roleplaying. I really enjoy roleplaying. I’ve spent the last seven years of my life jumping at every opportunity to participate in RP communities, play in TTRPG games, talk with experienced storytellers, and generally just immerse myself in the sorts of role-driven and character-driven stories that people have to tell. I’ve also spent a good part of that time attempting to make my own stories - starting small RP events, hosting tabletop games, and theorycrafting what makes a good RP experience - to various degrees of success. I’ve seen (and been a part of) some amazing stories, some terrible stories, and a lot of stories that fall somewhere in between the two extremes. But what exactly is Roleplaying?

Defining the Experience

Definitionally, role-playing isn’t hard to describe: it’s “assuming the persona of another character”. The trouble with this definition is that it’s so broad as to be nearly useless when trying to examine what makes for good roleplay. You assume the persona of another character when acting on stage, when writing or narrating a book, or when you play a video game, but if you tell someone “oh yeah, I love roleplaying!” and then take them to a theatre or start reading to them, they’re going to think you’re crazy.

Instead, when I ask “what is roleplaying”, I ask from a broader standpoint of “what is the end goal of participating in a roleplaying community?” Why do so many people take time out of their busy schedules to sit down for hours at a time just to pretend to be someone else?

To that end, I’ve done my best craft a definition of roleplaying that gives us a peak at its fundamental core. Consider this to be our abstract, the summary of what roleplaying is.

The goal of roleplaying is to collaboratively communicate a narratively-fulfilling story about our characters, their relationships with others, and the interactions they have with the broader world around them.

From this abstract, we can suss out the most critical components of successful RP as well.

Someone to Play With

…to collaboratively communicate […] about our characters, [and] their relationships with others…

I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that you cannot roleplay by yourself - or at least, if you do, it’s not going to be terribly fun. The enjoyment of roleplaying is the interactions. You can’t RP as a smith if nobody interacts with you to buy your goods or comment on your character’s prowess. You can’t RP as a warrior without anyone to send you on quests or help you take down the Big Baddies. I can describe my actions all day, but that doesn’t mean I’m roleplaying - I’m just narrating my actions. Even if you could roleplay alone, it wouldn’t be very enjoyable - at that point, you’d likely be better off writing a book so that your characters can interact with each other.¹

When you think of a good story, you think of love and hate, rivalry and camraderie, the breaking and forming of relational bonds between characters. While most roleplay communities do usually have a golden rule of “You are not the protagonist”, each character still has their own unique story from their own perspective. Even storytellers I’ve spoken with who argue that RP settings don’t need to have an overarching plot still recognize that there needs to be character development and interaction in order for the community to stay engaged. It’s the same reason why games fall apart when there are too few people showing up each week to the table, or why RP servers fold when there are only one or two people around at any given time. When the interactions start to dry up, players lose interest.

Something to Talk About

…the interactions they have with the broader world around them.

Okay, so you have players and characters…but in order for them to have things to talk about, they need experiences, and in order to have experiences. You can only expect players to hang around and chat in taverns for so long before eventually they want something to do.

Often times, storytellers assume that this has to be an active event - there needs to be some sort of monster to slay or dungeon to run, and it needs to be something new and exciting every time, otherwise players will get bored, right? Well…yes and no. There does need to be something for players to do basically all the time, which sounds daunting at first. But that “something” doesn’t need to be an active event that the storyteller has a direct hand in every moment of every day. It could be something the players have to put some actual hard work into, like deciphering a code or scouting out various locations, that once created doesn’t actually require much hands-on effort. It could be something ambiguous - perhaps there’s rumblings from the cave where the players last slew a dragon and now when they return, a false wall has finally crumbled under its own weight and revealed something new and mysterious. I call these Beats - they can stand alone, but they’re best tied into a greater plot.

All of these Beats require at least a little bit of effort on the part of the storyteller, but the trick is to find Beats where the amount of effort to create the “something” is a fraction of the amount of excitement and energy that they return back to the community. Usually this involves hinting towards a larger plot, leaving cliffhangers and clues for players to speculate about. You’d be amazed how something as simple as a roar heard across the town can stir players into action, and you didn’t even have to throw a real monster at them - you just eluded to its existence and the players did the rest!²

Somewhere to Aim For

The goal of roleplaying is to collaboratively communicate a narratively-fulfilling story

So you have characters (great) and you have Beats for characters to do (also great). Now you have to figure out how to give meaning to all those Beats, both in the context of the world and in the context of the characters. This is arguably the most critical piece of the puzzle. Just as every human being craves fulfillment from their lives, every player wants their character to feel fulfilled in some way. They want their character’s story to have a satisfying conclusion, whatever path they take. Often times, this also involves them being a part of a bigger story.

On a world level, at least a good number of those Beats that players have been encountering should connect to each other and form a story. The small Beats build into one, big Story, and so long as each Beat or Story feels like it builds into something bigger that can be further explored, players will keep poking at it. The only bad way to handle Beats is to throw a bunch of them at players that just…go nowhere. Sure, that event was really fun for one night, but now it’s over and the effort-to-payoff ratio for the storyteller(s) involved in putting it together was huge, whereas if it were connected to something bigger, then players might keep coming back and poking at it more and more, and you can get a lot of re-use out of it.

Make no mistake, however; you can make the best, most connected Beats and Stories, but characters need to be personally invested into a story for it to matter to them. You can’t have a narratively-fulfilling world story without characters to fill it, but you also can’t expect characters to take interest in the story of the world if it doesn’t somehow also play a part in their own individual stories as well. RP isn’t just about whatever story the world has to tell, it’s also about whatever story the characters want to tell about themselves, and thus it’s important to allow for certain characters to play into certain aspects of the plot at differing points.³

The Result

So we have three key components: character interactions, a world’s worth of things to do, and plot lines ranging from small to large that all connect together to form one giant tapestry of fantastic adventure. The characters have been introduced, the inciting incidents have happened (or are about to happen), and the plot has been set into motion: the three universal precursors to every story ever told, translated into roleplaying.

Now that we’ve covered the core principles of roleplay, we’ve laid the groundwork for future discussion of the finer details. In the next post, I’ll begin discussing some of the different sorts of Beats and Stories that can be made, from inner struggles and social politicking to mysterious intrigue and the mysteries of nature! Stay tuned!

Changes

2023-03-02 - Updated “Defining the Experience” to clarify why a more specific definition of roleplaying is necessary for the sake of the article.

Footnotes