What happens when the awesome role-playing idea you created for your character doesn't work in your game?
But it doesn't work in an online game. Between Zoom and Roll20, initiative is carefully managed so that each person gets to speak in turn. Background noises make it difficult to hear, so random asides from other players don't work as well.
We settled instead for having more of the dialogue happen in the fiction summaries we create afterward. I sympathize; this happened to my character too.
At one crowded convention hall at Gen Con, the Dungeon Master wasn't having it. He told me point blank to stop role-playing like that, because he couldn't hear anything I had to say. I realized that while the concept was fun for me, it wasn't fun for everybody else, so I dropped it. I still rolled the die to determine his mask in social encounters though.
That character ended up becoming Mr. Mask in my fantasy trilogy (he's introduced in Slightly Furmiliar and is the main character in Unfurmiliar), so his ridiculous backstory lived on.
Your Turn: What role-playing quirks sounded good in theory but didn't work out in practice?
"What do you think, sword?"
One of my players in my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign envisioned having whispered asides to his weapon, raising the question if the weapon was sentient or if his character was delusional. It was a fun idea...But it doesn't work in an online game. Between Zoom and Roll20, initiative is carefully managed so that each person gets to speak in turn. Background noises make it difficult to hear, so random asides from other players don't work as well.
We settled instead for having more of the dialogue happen in the fiction summaries we create afterward. I sympathize; this happened to my character too.
"Take your hands off your mouth, I can't hear you"
When one of my characters died from a plague in a 3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons Living Greyhawk game, I decided to play him as a reanimated necromancer in 4th Edition convention games. My corpse-character wore a mask to (poorly) disguise his condition and would roll a six-sided smiley-face die to show what mask he was wearing that day. It was meant to be funny and creepy. But he had to talk sometimes, so I would cover my mouth when I spoke for effect.At one crowded convention hall at Gen Con, the Dungeon Master wasn't having it. He told me point blank to stop role-playing like that, because he couldn't hear anything I had to say. I realized that while the concept was fun for me, it wasn't fun for everybody else, so I dropped it. I still rolled the die to determine his mask in social encounters though.
That character ended up becoming Mr. Mask in my fantasy trilogy (he's introduced in Slightly Furmiliar and is the main character in Unfurmiliar), so his ridiculous backstory lived on.
"This isn't working..."
I'm always willing to experiment with role-play, but I try to be cognizant when something is annoying or not working. Conversely my players often "feel out" their characters in Session Zero and lower levels of D&D, changing elements as they progress: backstories may be tweaked, accents may come and go, masks may be dropped, and we may not talk as much to our weapons as we used to. But it's important to to be flexible enough to allow space for both players and game masters to experiment. And if it doesn't work out, it's okay to drop it.Your Turn: What role-playing quirks sounded good in theory but didn't work out in practice?
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