Alright, so now you’ve started building your D&D character, let’s talk about playing your D&D character. Dungeons and Dragons after all is a role playing game, so you need to take on the role of your character.

For this, we’re going to assume that you’ve at least gotten through Building D&D Player Character – 301. At that point in time you’ve created the personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws for your character as well as created a backstory that is going to give the Dungeon Master some plot hooks to grab onto.

Let’s start by talking about two different parts of role playing, and I think things that are tricky to do, for beginning role players.

In Character vs. Out of Character

Alright, those are the two things. In role playing, you really do want to immerse yourself in playing the character. But how you deal with in character versus out of character is very important to your game.

In the games that I’ve run, I tend to act like players are always in character and speaking in game, unless it is something extremely obviously out of the game. If the person says some line where they seem to be talking to the party about the nobility who is standing in front of them to see what sort of read they are getting on the noble, the noble can here that.

Obviously, this tact can lead to some less than ideal situations. So how do you deal with what is done in character and out of character as a player?

Firstly, try and stay in character as much as possible. There are two reasons for this, you are going to connect with your character more and actually develop a well rounded character versus jumping back and forth. It takes time to get into the mindset of your character. You also will find that it makes it easier to separate meta knowledge of the game from your character when you stay in character. If you’re going back and forth, you are more apt to end up slipping meta knowledge into your characters voice, just on accident.

Secondly, specify when you are out of character. In my games, this is pretty easy, as a player you’ll start doing that fast, after you accidentally bad mouth the noble in front of him because you forgot to specify that something was above table talk. By context “above table” should make sense, but let me clarify what I mean by that. “Above table” means that it’s a conversations that is being had over the game, above the playing surface of the table, not in the game. This also helps with meta knowledge as well, because players will know that what is happening now isn’t in the game, and can discern what knowledge that they should bring back into the game.

There is one grey area, and that’s the planning montage. Which in the game could be narrated as a montage, but at the table can actually take a while. This is where you tend to get the blend of in character and out of character happening all at once as you compare spell lists, talk strategies, remember and remind each other what abilities you have. In character, not all of that makes sense to do, but some of it is kind of done in character. It is also interesting when there are those bits of role playing thrown into it. Maybe you come up with the start of your plan for your attack on the dragon next week, but you realize you don’t know everything, and because the timeline doesn’t force you to attack at dawn, you can go research, so that research scene might be drawn out and actually role played.

The danger with the planning montage is that too much meta knowledge could seep into the plan. It falls on yourselves as players to police that and determine what knowledge you’d actually have, but some times you might not know. So instead you can ask the dungeon master, would my character know that? By asking that simple question, you can quickly determine what information you can take back into the role playing situation.

So that’s the 101 course, there is a lot more to discuss on this topic, as I’m sure you can guess. But a good starting point is to remember to stay in character as much as possible. That is going to really help your role playing and give your character a voice that is there own (by which I don’t mean an accent, but you can do that if you want).

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