Your Character and You
- Tanner Jensen
- Oct 12, 2017
- 3 min read
In my experience. a lot of new players have trouble understanding the relationship between themselves and their characters. Some are not sure where to draw the line between what they want to do and what their character wants to do, and end up second-guessing their choices. Others blur the line a little too much, acting on their own impulses rather than committing to a particular character type. The focus of this post is how to better understand the relationship between your character and you, and how that understanding to lead to some more entertaining games.
To start, your character both is, and is not, you. Your character is an idea of your own creation, one with (depending on how much effort you put into its backstory) its own ideals, history, and relationships. Depending on the kind of character you chose to create, they may even hold completely different views as you, and that's okay. What matters is that when playing you are able to direct your character to act in a way that aligns with your character's beliefs, rather than your own. In a way, the character you create is a separate entity from yourself, though realistically it is little more than an idea and a collection of numbers.
At the same time, your character is you. You are ultimately the one who decides how your character will act and react in given situations. When other characters within the game speak to your character (whether they belong to the DM or another player) it is your role to speak for your character. As such, its important to distinguish between when you are speaking for your character and when it is your own personal comment.
Some players and gaming groups make use of accents, speech patterns, and emotional tones to indicate when they are speaking as their characters. For example, a character playing an old man might try to imitate their idea of an elderly voice (whether this is done realistically or to a comedic exaggeration depends on the player.) Other players who are less able or willing to make change their voice simply indicate when they are speaking as their character, and it is assumed that when they have not made this indication they are speaking as their self. Other groups simplify the procedure by making a simple rule that those speaking as their character should raise their hand while speaking.
Regardless of how you go about it, its important to understand that as close as you and character may be, you should also keep them separate. More specifically, avoiding something called metagaming. Let me explain.
Let's say that Bob plays Slitpipes Mcgee, the party rogue, who recently "acquired" some powerful magic items from a generous shopkeeper. Let's also say that one of the items is potentially significant for another party member, and that Slitty declines to share the information of his acquisition with the other members of the party. In this situation, Anna, another player, would know what Bob's character had done, but her character would not. If Anna chose to have her character confront Slitty and demand one of the items, with no in-game knowledge that they existed, she would be guilty of having her in-game character act on out-of-game knowledge. That's called metagaming.
Different DMs will have different approaches to metagaming, with some not viewing it as a problem at all and others avoiding it by passing out some information to individual players rather than the whole group, but the point I want to make is that there is a separation between what you know and what your character knows. Ignoring that separation can cause the game to be a lot less fun for those who wish to play more secretive characters. Avoiding metagaming can also help to make your game that much more enjoyable by committing to the realistic limitations of the game world, forcing you to get creative in solving problems.
You and your character can be as close or as separate as you choose, but the most important thing is that you do choose to play your character the way you want to. D&D is, after all, a game, and having fun is the ultimate goal. If you are not comfortable with using voices, don't. If you want to use them, go right ahead.
Whatever works best for you works best for the game, and as long as you understand who your character is and your relationship to them you should be just fine.
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