The Novice Dungeon Master: Encouraging Immersive Roleplay For Your Players

Mithic Realmz Newsletter #0018

Lights, Camera, Player!

Time to shine on the players

Encouraging your players to fully immerse themselves into their characters will be a different experience and happen at different times for your players.

As their DM they are already seeing the benefit of you playing interesting and immersive NPC characters.

Some players will fit right in and get right into being fully immersive, some will try it on like a piece of clothing and see if it’s a good fit and others may only do a bare minimum.

With this, there’s no right or wrong, it’s simply a process of how deep your players want to get into being immersed into their specific character and have fun with it.

Leading By Example

As the Dungeon Master, you can demonstrate your enthusiasm for role-playing by embodying different NPCs with distinct personalities, accents, and mannerisms. Show your players how fun and engaging it can be with these differing actors.

Creating A Safe Environment

Encourage your players to feel comfortable stepping into the shoes of their characters.

Some suggestions for this can be;

- An expression or two a character has during combat
- Actually wearing an item of clothing at the game table (Like a Bard character may always wear a red scarf, even in summer!)
- Talking with a specific (and respectful of cultures) accent
- Using their body language to provide to provide different mannerisms

Creating, Developing and Defining Character Backgrounds

What drives the characters to do what they do?

Here are a couple of suggestions that will help your character growth and motivations by developing a backstory;

- Describing their character’s formative experiences, aspirations, and personal challenges. This leads to authentic responses of why a character responds to certain events as they do

- Describing their character’s quirks, personality traits, and idiosyncrasies, adds a lot of depth to the specific character and allows for interesting interactions with fellow players and NPCs

- Fleshing out a character's backstory provides a foundation for developing meaningful relationships with other (both NPC & player) characters in the game. By establishing connections based on shared history, common goals, or conflicting interests, players create dynamic and compelling interpersonal dynamics & relationships that enrich the overall narrative.

Rewarding Your Players

Rewarding your players for effectively performing their characters can provide a real sense of gamesmanship. You can reward the players as you see fit when you see outstanding roleplay. Also if your players are consistently roleplaying their characters well, you can play back in additional XP or in-game rewards.

What’s tricky is for a DM to suggest and encourage. Positive reinforcement can help.

Here are some examples that I have seen at the table both as a DM or player.

- Seeing our thief work out details on bypassing an intricate trap and having us other players help with this person’s direction.

- Seeing our Bard meeting up with on their respective strongholds and negotiating with several Dukes of the realm to thwart each one on their political ambitions and secondly preventing a civil war.

- Watching over several different sessions our fighter who served in a war returned to the very small village of his birth and they gained levels, turned their little village into a hamlet, then a larger village, then a place of critical trade, then a town and a place where the party had built their holdings and this place was of super importance to the WHOLE party. All the while the fighter has social anxiety!

Encouraging dialogue

Having civil discourse in game with the players to interact with NPCs and other players through dialogue. Encourage them to think about how their character would speak, including their tone, vocabulary, and speech patterns, hand gestures and so forth.

You as a DM can ask some details of each character specific questions on the role play of that character. You can even ask questions when you feel a player is ‘going off the rails’. Encourage this roleplay as there may be a particular reason (player determined or even something you have slipped the player to ‘role-play’) that the player is acting ‘out of character’.

You can also ask about their feelings, thoughts, motivations, and reasons for an activity as part of the overall narrative and roleplay.

Do you have some interesting characters or backgrounds with your table? Drop a comment and let me know!

Further Resources & Curated Content

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Free one-shots to get you started - 25+ adventures

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Ebooks - loads of ebooks on Drive Thru RPG

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