How to be a better Roleplayer

A team of four researchers at North Carolina University recently wrote a paper with this impressively lofty title: “The Mimesis Effect: The Effect of Roles on Player Choice in Interactive Narrative Role-Playing Games”. Despite sounding like a PhD thesis so dry it would make effective kindling, the study itself is actually pretty straightforward. They examined how players made decisions in a simple roleplaying game of their own design, a sort of fantasy choose-your-own-adventure with visuals straight out of oldschool Zelda. They came to the conclusion that “participants role-play even if not instructed to, exhibiting a preference for actions consistent with their role.” When games give us options about how to portray a character, we try to make that portrayal cohesive. Thief players choose sneaky solutions to problems while warrior players tended to be more direct.

Everybody roleplays in games that let us. We just don’t always realize we’re doing it. Recognizing chances to roleplay and taking advantages of them is a great way to enjoy games more, but that's a skill that takes sharpening.

Players who come from a background in tabletop roleplaying games tend to be more aware of and deliberate about their roleplaying. I asked three professional RPG designers about the crossover between pen-and-paper roleplaying and videogames. Jeremy Crawford, codesigner of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and creator of the Blue Rose RPG, says, “Any time a videogame lets me create my own character, I can’t help but slip into a D&D mindset about the character creation process: ‘What are my character’s goals, beliefs, personality quirks, greatest loves,  and deepest hates?’ It’s hard for me not to ask questions like that.”

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 Source: PCGAMER