How To Role Play

A Retrospective
At this point in the history of our hobby, the concept of role playing may not require much explanation. Role-playing games have become a common item and have entered popular culture as tabletop activities, computer and consul games and online entertainment, sometimes featuring professional actors. At the time the Original Game was published, however, role-playing was not much understood. The Original Game does not even use the term “role-playing”.
To “play a role” is perhaps a concept borrowed from theater where actors portray the part of a character by following a script. The ”role” is a combination of the lines written by the author and various amounts of interpretation by the director and by the person actually playing the part. Anyone familiar with tabletop role-playing today can probably appreciate this comparison, at least on some level. This has not always been the case.
At its most basic, the role-playing game involves a dialog between one or more players who control the actions of one or more player characters and the referee who describes the environment as seen by the player characters and who controls all the rest of the game’s imaginary setting including all the non-player characters. The dialog is frequently characterized by the referee describing things from the player character’s perspective, in effect acting as the player character’s senses, and asking the player, “What would you like to do now?”
In response, most players think to themselves, “What would I do in this situation?”. This seems logical. In fact, “What would you do?” is a question many games were asking players prior to the introduction of role-playing games. Like many of the first generation of role-play gamers, I was introduced to the Original Edition game through wargames - and in fact thought of D&D as a new wargame involving fantasy tropes rather than historical ones. Many historical wargames at the time were asking the question, “What would you do?” when faced with fighting the battle of Waterloo, or the D-Day Invasion? Part of the fun in such wargames based on simulation is to see if you might do better than the generals in history.
But in a role-playing game we are not usually playing as ourselves. In a fantasy RPG we may take on the role of a magic user, an elf or other fantastic “ make believe” entity. In a space RPG we may play as a space traveler, an alien or even as a robot with artificial intelligence. Even while playing as an investigator of the supernatural in a fictional version of the 1920s, we are doing so as a character much different from our Twenty-first Century selves.
Tabletop role-playing is a socially interactive game. As players we declare our intent for the characters. Then together with the referee rules are applied, dice are rolled and a result is determined. The outcome is interpreted with respect to the in-game fiction and events move forward. The success or failure of the characters will provide entertainment for the players. In this way the “role-play” game is played. Mentally challenging ourselves to think like the game’s characters is part of learning to “role-play”. By asking ourselves, “What would they do?” rather than, “What would I do?” the mental jump into playing the role is made. Our game characters can be, should be, very different from us. In retrospect it seems so obvious, but I can recall how difficult this transition in thinking was at first and what a ”discovery” I thought I had made when it first started to all make sense.