On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 07:59:00AM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: >Paradox: I like to roleplay. I'm a bad actor. > >At least, a bad improv actor. I don't do funny voices. No one, least of >all me, is going to be convinced that I (a short middle-aged nerdette) am >Fastlane (a tall male construction worker and part-time superhero). Nor >do I want to be (and that's a whole nother paradox... #4, right now). One of the best GMs I know has actively got players worried by having an argument with himself (as two separate NPCs). One player said later "I thought it was going to come to blows". He doesn't do voices, but he can project a character like nobody's business. I don't do voices either but I try to do mindset. I'm fairly poor at improvising dialogue, but the content tends to be right; as far as I'm concerned, that's the important thing. I find it easier when I'm GMing, possibly because I've had time to think in advance about what the NPC knows and what his reactions might be to what the PCs can tell him... >Not much more to this paradox, I guess. Except sometimes I wonder if my >tabletop roleplaying would work out better if I narrated it third-person >past-tense instead of trying to (verbally, anyway) act it out. I'm pretty >sure it would be. That works for some players, but in my experience it does tend to give a feeling of detachment, particularly when it's something that could be covered by direct speech. I'm fortunate in my regular groups: we don't have people who need to make formal distinctions between in-character and out-of-character comments, so we can keep a fairly informal flow going. (I'm assuming that you're not playing in a noir game, of course, in which that sort of narration could be entirely in-genre.) R -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
