User Blog:
How to Win at Roleplaying: Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Extra bits worth thinking about ...

Botching
Always accept the botch. Why bother cheating it? More to the point, cheating it is petty whereas a true botch gives wonderful opportunities to see what happens next and gives you a decent story to tell at a later date. Everybody should have at least one story of how everything went absolutely wrong at the same time. Botch well, and botch often. Really, what’s the worst that can happen?

Voices
Silly voices and accents are a tricky thing to judge but more often than not are worthwhile. Accents, foreign and British regional, anything. It’s an instant way of dropping into character and helps right away with the roleplaying. How about a bruiser with fangs, you try talking as if your bottom jaw juts out and instantly it’s more manly? For foreign accents, just imagine you’re in a low budget war movie from the 50s and you can’t go wrong. Just be careful doing British regional accents with the people around the table, the Glaswegian might not have a great sense of humour when it comes to such things.

Communication
Talk to the other characters, in character, often. Speaking as a GM, if you’re playing a game where the player characters are spending as much time talking to each other as the players are talking to the GM then it’s a big sign of a fun, enjoyable and immersive game and it all adds to the fun.

Ingenuity
In a video game RPG, the biggest portion of gameplay mostly revolves around get better weapons, fight bigger monsters, but as we all know one of the overriding features of a tabletop roleplaying game is the freedom to do anything that your imagination can come up with. Sometimes the right answer is to charge in with flail flying and machine gun blasting, and sometimes it’s not. The big detail is knowing which situation calls for what and when to think completely outside the box.

There follows some examples of three gaming situations that I’ve been placed in for you to consider how you might deal with the situation, and don’t forget that almost all situations have numerous answers and that there is often more than one right answer.