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So, I've never played a tabletop game, but it's something I'm looking into and am open to trying.
I watched this one-shot last night:
And honestly I found the acting to be super-cringe. And also all the little side conversations (with acting) just dragged the whole thing out. How common is this kind of behavior in a tabletop game?
So, I've never played a tabletop game, but it's something I'm looking into and am open to trying.
I watched this one-shot last night:
And honestly I found the acting to be super-cringe. And also all the little side conversations (with acting) just dragged the whole thing out. How common is this kind of behavior in a tabletop game?
Didn't click the video, but from my experience players usually just talk with their nornal voice. DM or GM or whatever one calls a referee can sometimes spice up the game by making up voices for NPC's.
Some DMs (which I disagree with) demand that you "PERFORM" actions, like if you want to convince an NPC, he wants you to ACT THE SHIT OUT OF IT and if you don't, then he makes it unsurmountable difficulty roll.
Ask the DM the informal rules beforehand, see if you even want to participate in this shit. I'm not a fan of it. It makes it impossible for non-charismatic people to play charismatic characters, etc. It's a problem.
It varies. If you are playing with actors it can be an acting exercise but usually its played more like a game but you know, occassionally someone will say something epic etc, like in TT 40k or whatever.
In all the TTRPG groups where I've played all talking was in normal voice, except when the GM plays one peculiar character or one player decides to act (which means he is about to do something very brave or very stupid, or often both).
But most of the time it's a laidback back and forth between the GM and the players or among them.
The problem with any kind of such recorded sessions 'plays' and tabletop livestreams is that the creators from the get-go assume that it will be shown to a 'wider audience' so they usually lean towards and encourage a more play-acting, theater-like atmosphere at the table. The standard tabletop experience is (or rather was - depending on in which circles you congregate) nothing like it.
It is perfectly valid to never make 'funny voices' of the characters you play, and to just describe everything of what your character does in third-person. It is perfectly fine to shorten the 'party breakfast' or 'shopping sessions' into a few lines narrated by the DM, with player's chiming in if their characters did anything of importance, instead of playing it out in real-time for half-an-hour or longer. It is perfectly ok to NOT dress up like circus clowns while going to a tabletop session - in fact, it is encouraged.
What matters is to Role-play the characters (/NPCs - if you're the DM) while trying to uphold the Verisimilitude and Logic of the given game/setting. And no, that DOESN'T MEAN 'doing voices'. It's trying to portray how a given character would realistically behave in a certain situation, even if it's different from the behaviors or beliefs of the person that plays him. A Cleric should not question if his god exists, 'cuz he gets his powers from a freaking existing deity, even if the player is an atheist. A Barbarian driven by zealous hate of orcs, as they killed his family, should not do hour long philosophical divagations after every orc encounter, whether 'all orcs are evil' and 'is it really alright to kill them', just because the player enjoys debates about morality - especially if all greenskins in the given setting are rapist mongrels or mushroom-spawned killing machines. Characters shouldn't know how to properly combat vampires, if they never encountered them in-game, even if the players already faced them in the previous game.
That's why I don't want to play in custom settings anymore. They're never deep enough, with never enough info for me to portray my character realistically. All it ends up being is my character not knowing shit about the world and stumbling in the dark, because I don't know shit about the world, because the DM isn't going to write a 100 pages world design doc, and so I can't make any assumptions at all beyond the generic shit, and thus the setting BECOMES DE-FACTO generic through my character.
Tips to new players:
- don't play dnd 5
- don't play generic setting
- don't play with DM who asks you to act things out
Acting shouldn't be part of it, imho.
Of course a creative DM or character might sometime put a spin on a description or something, but it's not the theater, it's a game of dice and stats (at least if it's a game I want to play).
the only "acting" in TRPG should be making suboptimal choices because of your character.
Like if you play paladin you refuse to take reward for quest. Or you refuse to kill, loot bodies... etc.
I was playing post apo (fucking 20 y ago?!) and my character had a botch up vehicle. I was doing by myself a dice check every time we drive, and then i declare that it cannot turn left, or the side doors fall out (no longer cover passenger from bullets) etc.
This makes the session fun, not doing gay dialogues with too much hand waving.
The game I played in in college, I apparently spoke differently when I was 'in character', but it wasn't conscious on my part. I didn't even realize I was doing it until another player mentioned it. It wasn't acting so much as a shift in vocabulary and tone - a mercenary warrior would talk differently than a novice wizard.
The theatre kids seem to have wildly misunderstood the short history of RPGs. If you ask them, they will tell you that Dungeons and Dragons (and it's imitators) were a painfully nerdy pass-time, fit only for making fun of in movies and TV. The young actors then got involved in the hobby, made it more dramatic, more about emotional expression and personal fulfilment, and created a hobby you can now be proud to put on your CV. This is very far from reality —— and I will endeavour to explain why.
2. Twelve Chadly Men
It's game night.
As a gaming group, I've collected 12 players —— a dozen characters from fiction and reality, who each have a perfect 10/10 COOL score.
Among these Joe Cools, I have included the The Man With No Name, Snake Plisskin, 'Mad Max' Rockastonsky, some Charles Bronson character (I can't remember their names), a Lee Marvin character, and a Samurai, lol.
So far, I have chosen 6 men. I will also include 4 debanoir lady-killers. These are: Sean Connery, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Cary Grant.
Finally, I pick a pair of wild-cards that don't really fit the first 2 categories: these are James Coburn (for his teeth) and Bruce Campbell (for his chin).
You may notice that there are no women. This is because of your rampant sexism. Please try to do better, Codex.
Once I've coralled my pack of human studs, I will herd them into the next chapter: The Game
3. The Game
And so we come to the big kahuna itself: The Game. I invite these twelve men to my home (stop giggling at the back, please) I push all furniture in the house into one long Mr. Burns dinner table, and take up my position at one end on my evil throne. As official Dungeon Mistress, I gently clear my throat, a polite way to suggest that people need to shut-the-fuck up. Without further ado, I begin my game.
At first, I just play D&D the old-fashioned way. We're focused on gaming itself: statistics, rolling dice, combat, whatever. My contention here is that if you just grabbed a group of extremely cool people and just took them through the mechanics of table-top gaming, there wouldn't be a problem. Someone like Charles Bronson, who basically made a career of pretending to shoot people, couldn't really object to the idea of rolling some dice and pretending he's stabbed someone with a sword. And so my game (or at least the first half) goes just fine.
But in the second half of the game, we start to play in a much more modern style. I explain to my cool-as-a-cucumber group that they should pretend to be a bunch of half-elves, half-orcs, and goblins, speak in appropriate voices, and stay in this role all night.
Suddenly the whole room goes silent. The Man With No Name fixes me with his trademark steely glare. 'Mistress of what?' Snake Plisken wonders aloud. Max becomes even madder. As the idea is translated to him, the Samurai makes a face like I've personally bombed his home. The group all makes hasty excuses, suddenly 'remembering' that they have to be elsewhere. They leave me sitting on my Evil Over-Lady throne, now all alone.
Conclusion
Although I've seriously damaged any hope I had of ever seeming cool, my experiment has been a success. I've proven once-and-for-all that it's not rolling dice and playing a game that make you uncool.
It's doing so while proclaiming loudly that you're Fagglore Fancy-Pants, Lord of All Faerie-dom.
Thank you for reading.
—— Dr. Stella Brando
J. Liang School of Arts
5 September, 2024
The only people who did voice acting were the people who played a cliched dumb barbarian, which usually just meant speaking in third person. We were playing a game though. Those critical role people are performing for views on a monetized channel. Two different situations.
Yeah, the "full blown voice acting" thing was only ever maybe 10% of people I ever played with. And nobody really cared that much if one person was being theatrical and then the next person says "I ask the shopkeeper for directions." You just have to be in a real game with friends and not be chasing youtube fame and click money (or playing with people who think they are).
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unless one of them is Crispy
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