NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 2442621" data-attributes="member: 259">I have several different playstyles; one continuum might be between light roleplaying and heavy roleplaying.For light roleplaying, I don't have much character notes ahead of time; I might have only a paragraph of background information, or even less.  I've got a couple mannerisms, and I'm ready to go.  If I'm DMing, I don't know the major NPCs' backstories, their motivations, their family lives, their fears, and so forth:  I just know what their voice sounds like.For heavy roleplaying, I have several pages of notes on PC background:  their history, their familial ties, their hopes and dreams and fears, the history of important pieces of equipment, perhaps a letter they've written home, a description of their culture, and so on.  NPCs have similar details:  I know for whom they're working and for whom they'd like to be working, anything weird going on at home, the religion they follow and why, and so forth.I bring this up because of something unexpected:  I find that when I do light roleplaying, I am a BETTER roleplayer.  When I am DMing and I'm thinking about all the motives for the NPCs, I'm devoting a lot of thought to keeping their actions true-to-form and internally consistent, and often end up with a fairly mechanical NPC.  If I'm making up the NPC as I go along, I'm giving them weird verbal tics, coughs, facial expressions, palsied hands, and postures.  My PCs that are played off the top of my head are free to be silly, and that means I'm willing to take more risks with how I play them, instead of trying to extemporize based on a set of hard-and-fast character traits that I established beforehand.At first blush, you might characterize my light roleplaying style as nonimmersive, and my heavy roleplay style as immersive.  These days I'm leaning more toward the apparently nonimmersive playstyle because I find it more immersive.Daniel</blockquote>

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