How to get your Players to Roleplay in Dungeons and Dragons

role-playing is the most immersive and rewarding part of Dungeons & Dragons getting to create a heroic fantastical character to dive into but how do you get your players to commit to this idea there are so many things that you can do as a dungeon master to encourage and support better role-playing during your Dungeons & Dragons game and today we're gonna show you how my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our show where we cover everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for Dungeon Master's and guides for players we upload new episodes every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss one now today we're talking about one of the biggest and most common questions we get from Dungeon Master's new and old how do I get my players to roleplay well it's a difficult question so let's get rolling many players and Dungeon Master's these days draw a lot of inspiration from live-streaming campaigns such as critical role The Adventure zone dice camera action or maybe even our show dungeons of Drakon hein and are wondering how you can capture a little bit of that magic that you see between the players and the dungeon masters for your game table and the first step really is defining for yourself and for your group what better role-playing looks like at your table an important note though is that not everybody role plays the same and in fact a lot of these livestream shows that you watch are very carefully selected in the players who excel at role-playing but most of our home games there's usually a few players around the table who are maybe a bit more shy or reserved with doing voices or handling social situations at the D&D table and more of the role-playing comes out in various forms the key here is not to criticize them for not doing a voice or not playing and acting out an entire scene but moreso looking at the choices that they make and are those driven by character or is that just them goofing off at the table the essence of role-playing is making character driven choices not adopting a funny voice putting a weird costume and pretending to be your character in the first person although that can help it can help a lot and you as a Dungeon Master one of the first things that you need to do is make sure that the other players at your table are not denigrating or making fun of the others for trying to roleplay it really takes a lot of bravery to jump in and roleplay a character and pretend to be someone else and it can be a little bit embarrassing at first I find that when a new player jumps into D&D you as the DM being able to be forthright with your character voices and your role-playing allows the people around the table to see that it's okay to do so and there should never be a reason to make fun of somebody's bad joke or terrible voice that they try to do have fun with it and encourage it feed off of each other's role-playing and that will really bring up the whole table and encourage everybody there to participate at the same time even the most immersed group that is very seriously in character also needs the chance to step away from it and laugh for a few moments 100% immersion is also not necessarily a good thing so recognize that there needs to be a balance and that every D&D group is going to find its own balance so have this conversation with your players of where your group is going to lie on the spectrum do you want to do voice acting do you want to put on costume pieces or do you just really want everyone to not metagame so much and make more character-driven decisions about what happens in the story perhaps you want to have more character development and see the characters grow and change over the course of that or maybe they just want to get more engaged with the history and lore of your world and actually care about what's happening in the campaign all of these are completely reasonable expectations as long as you've discussed them with your group first so that everyone knows what to expect one of the greatest moments and as a DM one of the most rewarding moments to know that you've done a good job inspiring your players to roleplay is when in character banter starts to occur but wean the players at the table where they're actually communicating with each other and planning things out or working through a situation but in character it's a really rewarding experience and watching it happen at your table is amazing you need to watch out for these moments because when your players start role playing with each other it's an opportunity for you to sit back and enjoy the rewards of what you've fostered it's one of the most pleasurable moments in a campaign when you as a DM just to get to listen to your players for a change and see the awesome role playing happening in front of you these moments feel so rewarding as a dungeon master and if you want to see these things start happening at your table there's a couple things that you can start doing with your group to really foster the role-playing to get to this moment the first thing that you can do is take the lead by using descriptive language setting up scenes and using your own character voices to roleplay the NPC's you're taking the lead on encouraging your players to roleplay the second thing that you can do is create opportunities by presenting scenarios in which character driven decision making and role-playing can actually flourish as opposed to just a hack-and-slash combat fest the next one is getting your players to choose personality traits and flaws that are fun and easy to display at the table with their role-playing the next thing that you can do is work with your players to create a simple backstory for their character which establishes meaningful relationships between the characters as well as character driven goals lastly award inspiration actively and often to encourage good role-playing and those five things will give you a set of strategies that you can use with your players to encourage better role playing with these things in mind let's talk a little bit more about how you can take the lead at your table to foster better role playing and what that means player engagement starts with you don't underestimate that you as the DM have the power to encourage and set the tone for the role playing at your table you might want to partner in with another one of the strong role players at your table and talk with them about how the two of you can work together to encourage the other players to roleplay a little bit more this some of the simplest things that you can do just to get started are addressing the players by their character names in moments where it matters to clearly mark when in character conversation is occurring as at the end you want to use detailed descriptions of the environments and the NPCs that they're encountering to engage all of the senses which encourages role-playing bringing up things like what they see hear smell taste feel really can help them start to imagine the role-playing situation at the table you don't have to adopt a funny voice in fact you're gonna be speaking so much as the dungeon master that if you start doing really weird voices it might harm your voice a little bit if you're not careful but you may want to apply some of the techniques that we're gonna be talking about with using bonds ideals flaws and personality traits in your own NPCs monsters and descriptions and scenarios this is an easy practice to bring those NPCs to life and give them more meaning which encourages role-playing at the table if you're setting an example for your players it's only a matter of time before they follow suit with you as well it's a well-known principle that if you keep steel in one drawer and Flint in the other you're not going to get much of a fire and similar to taking the lead your adventure and campaign needs to provide the players with space and opportunities to roleplay this means that they need opportunities to make character driven decisions which affect the campaign in a meaningful way present the players with situations and scenarios that really dive into their personality traits bonds flaws and general character stories the more that you do this and the more that you present these situations the more it's going to encourage that player to engage in a specific way if they've written down a very specific flaw and you present that in front of them in the game and they remember it on their character sheet you're going to get a role-playing moment out of it for instance if your player writes down that their character is afraid of insects maybe your next combat encounter in ball a swarm but at the same time might involve a conflicting element of that character's personality so they have to choose which element of their character is in control a character's flaws personality traits bonds and ideals can make a big impact during a moral quandary or strategic discussions or when they're dealing with allies that have conflicting goals or an investigation these are the types of things that might affect the future of a town a city or even the entire world and they shift the discussion from are we going to survive - what is the world going to look like when this is all over and those are interesting questions which will affect the character development and be affected by the characters as well oftentimes a great way to encourage role playing is to present situations that have no right answer only a choice that the players will have to make between two situations that may not be optimal either way that they go this will really dive in to their flaws and ideals and goals for them to make those decisions at the table there's a reason why you had your player characters write down their flaws ideals and bonds and so that you can refer to them when you're designing your adventures of course even if you love hack-and-slash combat and dungeon crawls the story and role-playing doesn't need to stop just because the swords have been drawn roleplay in combat can take the shape of battle cries in character banter hurling insults and more the way that you handle combat can change drastically based on the type of character you've made not necessarily in the class that you pick but in the way that you've designed their personality a rogue might be hiding around the outside and you might want to describe more thoroughly the way that they stay in the shadows and try to avoid being seen whereas the barbarian might run headfirst into combat screaming about the blood of his enemies and just slashing people to bits these are combat moments but they also define that character's personality and as a DM trying to prompt these moments and look for your players giving these moments is an excellent source of encouraging roleplay as well one of the best ways that you can do this in battle is the infamous phrase how do you want to do this or how does how do you kill the monster asking your players to describe the actions that they take in battle particularly in those dramatic moments when they slay a foe leap off a building or perform an amazing stunt give them the opportunity to visualize their character and describe how their characters behave which will tell them a lot about how they see their character and who that person is so don't sell this short use that descriptive language in battle because it really does say a lot about the player characters don't forget that outside of combat there's a lot of social situations that can come up that can drive character driven conversation at the table interacting with NPCs negotiating talking to making decisions and you can actually have these in the middle of combat you could have them after the combat before combat they can just litter your campaign everywhere with great moments for the characters to interact with each other I find it so important to find what the social dimension of every combat encounter is by using enemies that might be willing to surrender or make a deal even accept the player-character surrender or have some sort of engagement with them in the middle of a battle if you look at many books movies and TV shows they do this already because the drama of battle is such a great place for fantastic storytelling to occur so use that to your advantage if you do have hack and slash minded players you already have the circumstances to create awesome drama and role-playing you just have to do a little bit of work to bring it forward now there are a few things that you as a DM can ask your players to do directly such as creating great personality traits and flaws the trick with this is asking your players to create personality traits and flaws which draw them towards adventure or respond to the types of things that they might encounter in their adventures of course you don't need to reveal any of the secrets of your campaign you don't need to look at the things that your player characters are proposing for their characters and if you're not seeing personality traits and flaws that might actually come up in play ask your players to create a few more instead the point of having a character flaw is to create interesting situations that do get the player characters into trouble once in a while those create memorable moments and a lot of players try to downplay their character flaws and they do so as a disservice to themselves because they're actually cutting themselves off from a lot of great and easy role-playing opportunities I've said this before in several episodes and I like to live this in any campaign that I play in but I always find that having a good flaw is really what makes the drama come out of the table I encourage everybody to give in to your flaws and play them up rather than to play them down the higher your flaw is the more relevant it is at the table without being disruptive to the game I find that it can actually create some of the most interesting moments and to not worry so much about winning every combat but instead having fun with it and playing your character some of the most memorable characters in fiction and TV shows and movies have had fatal flaws behind their characters and that's part of what makes them relatable so well loved and what provokes some of their most amazing adventures don't let your players squeak out of having an awesome flaw for their characters really encourage them to go the distance with this there are many many players that freak out at the notion of having a flawed character and don't want to play one but there are flaws out there that are fun constructive and interesting a character flaw doesn't necessarily mean need to be my character doesn't trust anybody and won't work with anyone that's not a good flaw for Dungeons & Dragons campaign good flaws include things like fears of insects or fire overconfidence thinking that they're always right maybe even addictive personalities or being prone to taking big risks that they really shouldn't these are interesting flaws that make for great characters beyond the personality traits and flaws the next thing that you should ask from your characters is for their bonds goals and relationships this is a little bit different than asking your players to create a backstory you can still ask them to do this but I find that it's best to keep a backstory to a minimum oftentimes some players will take a backstory writing exercise like homework and they'll do it but then promptly forget about everything they wrote in it and then it never comes up and play at all oops whereas making bonds and goals for a character are things that are actually meaningful to them and this is where probably I've had the most success because I asked my player characters to create a bond or relationship that ties their character to another character in the party which means that all my players have to make characters that already know at least one or two other people in the group in some way for me this was the biggest success at getting my players to roleplay because create having an existing relationship between two characters is something that players can really easily understand and that they know how to play off of right right away when I was designing my character for one of our last campaigns I had them be childhood best friends with one of the other characters they were both members of the same Assassin's Group one was a rogue and one was a monk but they still both operated as assassins within an assassin's guild or having characters that had worked together on a previous job or studied together maybe at a mage's college or something of that sort a great relationship to tie two characters together is to make them siblings or you could even go the route of having characters that are in a relationship or have fallen in love or having those people in their backstory in general having friends family and other relationships maybe if someone has saved someone else's life or they each other a life-debt maybe one of the characters save the other's life and there's a life-debt between them maybe there is a debt between two characters their former adventuring companions childhood best friends or anything else you can imagine the point here is that these kind of relationships define how the characters perceive each other and bind them together in really meaningful ways leading to a very cohesive party at the same time these relationships often create other NPCs and characters which can play a part in the campaign as well and give the player some really really clear motivations in one of our last campaign the players were childhood friends cousins and relations that were all heading to a wedding together and that was the kickoff for the entire campaign and it really resulted in a very cohesive group that cared about each other quite a lot another piece of this is that by creating NPCs that represent the family members or relations to those characters will also encourage role-playing a lot of people like to go the route of creating a character who all of their parents and family are dead and that's why they're an adventurer although this might be the very Batman way to go it doesn't always work and actually it might be more interesting to have several family members still alive who you care deeply about as a character because it's easy to roleplay out a situation where your mother or father of your character have been kidnapped by the bad guys and now that becomes your priority to rescue them using these first of all as the DM to find these places within your characters backstories to pull on and encourage role-playing is key and as a player role-playing being able to dive into these emotions will really help you to roleplay I have seen people that are a little bit cynical when we suggest this that say that having the characters families involved in the plot of the campaign is a surefire way to end up with a party of orphans because threatening the things the players care about somehow causes them to never want to care about anything at all and to me that signals a little bit of a breakdown in the discussion that's happening at the table player characters need things to care about and family is one of the things that people care about more than anything else in the world if you can't get your players to care about their family how are you gonna get them to care about the rest of the world if you are going to ask your players to create a backstory for their characters it's now on you to actually make sure that that backstory is relevant to your campaign if you want them to care about it what this means is that if you have a party of four or five characters each with their own backstories even with them just intertwining a little bit the characters stories actually will become a major focal point for their campaign and this is a very good reason why you as a Dungeon Master should think about how your campaigns story arc is going to integrate the character stories I myself will often not make the final decision about my villains NPCs and the overall arc of my campaign until I have a very good sense of what character as my players want to play because for me it's more important than I tell a story about the player characters than anything else that I might be trying to say the players care more about their own characters than anything else in your world so making your campaign relevant to them is a surefire way to encourage more role playing as a player writing my backstory one thing that I try to do is create at least three events people or other things that the DM could use to build the campaign I also try to build it up to an open-ended but immediate goal that my player is looking for so all the events in their backstory don't have to be complete things that happened and finished but more things that may have occurred to them people that they may have met or that are important to them that can help drive their story forward from the point that the campaign starts and it's also not necessary to save a player characters backstory resolution for the end of the campaign in fact I find it's more interesting to have the player characters personal stories happen at the beginning of the campaign so that you get to foreshadow your big epic narrative well the players are blurring their characters in many ways your players aren't really going to discover who their characters are until they've played a couple game sessions so having a couple of your early game sessions dedicated to the player characters and their own personal stories is going to give your players more opportunities to figure out who their characters are and then as their own personal arcs are coming to a close usually for me I try to wrap it up somewhere between level 4 and level 6 that's when you can start integrating your big epic world-changing storyline and now the players are gonna have a way to respond to that that is meaningful to them so when your players do deliver these amazing role-playing moments it's important to remember to reward them by giving them inspiration inspiration was a mechanic introduced in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition as a way to reward role-playing that wasn't giving out bonus xp or extra treasure the inspiration is really simple you grant a player character inspiration and then they can spend it to gain advantage on any d20 role later on players can't hoard inspiration points they either have it or they don't we are both guilty of finding inspirations sometimes difficult to use or easy to forget there's different ways to implement this at your game table and there's several ways that you can try to remember to reward inspiration for good creativity one thing that I do at my table is at the end of every game session we have a little discussion about some of the most memorable moments from that session who really stood out as the person who role played the best and handle the situation not necessarily by winning a combat but by using their character and their character's personality traits even flaws to create that epic moment at the table and that's who we usually give inspiration to so that they have it at the start of the next game there are other ways to do this however in contrast you can award inspiration early and often in your game session and a great it's a great way to really get your players to come out of their shell and feel like they're being recognized for a role playing more instead of saving inspiration as a reward that you only give once procession to one player which I kind of disagree with Kelly a little bit on this one I think that you should give an inspiration a lot that's the best way to use it in my opinion I think that players should get inspiration four or five six times per game session and in fact one of the ways that you can use this is by telling a player hey once every game session you can gain inspiration for role-playing your personality train your flaw your bond and your ideal and if you successfully roleplay all four of those traits every game session you'll get an inspiration point each time and if you do all four I'll give you a bonus one at the start of the next game session as well this will really have your players looking at all the different elements of their character and trying to bring them into play over the course of the game session the one caveat to this is that the players can't horde the image the inspiration points they need to spend them before they can earn them again as a bit of an add-on to this you can allow the players to give their inspiration points to somebody else so that if you have one really strong role player who's constantly getting inspiration they can be handing it out to the other players and really feel like a leader in the party one fun thing to do at your table is to use tokens or coins or some other physical object to announce that that person has inspiration you can pass it around at the table you can pass out multiples of it at the table just so that everybody is aware and feel special for being able to roleplay and feels rewarded for doing that yeah again the inspiration mechanic is a little bit clunky I have to give credit for dyson logos for getting this idea to actually give out inspiration for flaws bonds ideals specifically over the course of a session other really great themes like atom COBOL that said that they think that the inspiration system is a little bit weak and I do agree I think it's a little bit tough to get the hang of it I personally forget about the inspiration system a lot because I'm used to expecting my players to just role play a lot anyways so I don't use it so much myself because I've already done the work to encourage my players to roleplay more anyways but I do think that is a really great system that if you've got players that need to come out of their shell and start role-playing more this reward system is really tangible and really helps them see the difference they're making to wrap this all up there's the last few things to watch out for and look for at your table regarding role-playing keep in mind that subtlety is key not every player at the table needs to have a crazy voice and be in character all the time there's subtle little things that everybody at the table might be doing to really roleplay their character and it's about those character driven decisions that make them good at roleplay keep an eye out for these things it's really easy to miss the player that's making character driven choices but might be a little bit more shy or quiet especially when they're sitting beside a bombastic person that's talking in a dramatic voice and cracking tons of jokes and really immersing themselves in their character people do roleplay in different ways so watch out for that in particular one thing to be on the lookout for is a DM is players who use the term it's what my character would do to mask disruptive behavior as character driven decisions no amount of role-playing storytelling or immersion is worth harming the good will respect and Trust between your players at the table it is entirely possible for a player to use good role-playing strategies to act in a mean-spirited way towards the other players at the table and then hold up the shield up it's what my character would do to justify that behavior and if you see that happening at your table as a dungeon master you need to put a stop to it and call the player out on what they are doing which is really infecting the good and awesome things that can come from role-playing and turning it into a little bit of a weapon to use against other players in a very disruptive way encourage your players to adopt constructive attributes for their characters this doesn't mean that it's not possible for your players to roleplay a rude mean angry loner sort of character that might be prone to being abrasive with the other characters it just means that the players need to make sure that that behavior is contained within the fictional world and isn't spilling out into the real social dynamics at your game table because that can really cause some difficult problems and really create an unfriendly environment at your game so this has been our guide to getting your players to roleplay in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you have any great tips or tricks let us know about them in the comments below if you enjoy our show please consider supporting our work on patreon you can follow the links in the description below to find out how you can contribute to our work and check us out playing live in dungeons of dragon haim our live play D&D stream which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find prior episodes in our playlist right here we also have an awesome playlist with more tips for Dungeon Master's and right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 162,208

Rating: 4.9553552 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: bSmsjRT06gA

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019