At its core, this article argues that acting isn’t really what the tabletop role-playing experience is about. It can be, but in many cases it isn’t. In some cases, it’s because the adopted playstyle actively de-prioritises it, but that’s not the focus here. I want scenes that are meaningful, have depth, and convey some emotion, ideally in the context of a story, where a group of people are playing to find out.
I just don’t think it has as much to do with acting as some people believe. So let’s dive in.
The actual play experience
There were always things I saw that I thought might be worth duplicating or incorporating at our gaming table from Critical Role, but here is the unique thing: it was always some level of the underlying output I wanted to duplicate, not the direct output or via the same raw inputs.
The the acting lens of the tabletop role-playing experience has shifted in prominence over the years. It waxes and wanes. It definitely started to wax again when actual plays like Critical Role rose in prominence. It’s easy to see why, as having actual actors as your players allows the story to unfold in a very emotional and meaningful way.
Despite being a fan of Critical Role from the beginning and watching campaigns one and two religiously, I formed the view that the games at our table were better for us than Critical Role’s. I never thought Critical Role delivered the perfect tabletop role-playing game experience, despite the outcomes I’d like to see in a gaming experience having some level of broad similarity.
So, even though the acting lens of the experience has waxed, the impact on me was to focus more on how to achieve certain outputs without incorporating acting, since I don’t do voices, and I’m certainly not going to pretend I can act.
Acting skill is only one pillar
It’s all too easy to assume that acting skill is the top-level skill that transforms the gaming experience. It’s easy to see why, especially if you get to see actual actors at a gaming table, which is commonly available now at the click of a YouTube video. You get to see people emote, cry, be earnest, and deliver the emotion and meaning of what they are saying spontaneously, which is very impressive. What’s important to realise is that there are actually three things going on, let’s call them pillars. I’ve semi-forced them into three words beginning with T so I can call them the three T’s.
Pillar #1: Talent
Actual plays have an actor’s edge, as the cast has the ability to convey a variety of emotions, as you’ll see in a TV show, film, or voice-acted in an animation or video game. It’s great if someone at your table is good at such professional or amateur dramatics, but this is rare.
This skill is almost impossible to duplicate in the ways you might see the cast do it in an actual play. It’s more likely that if someone thinks they can, they’re actually plunging into torturous melodramatics, which are probably more distracting than helpful.
Pillar #2: Time
Actual plays have these crazy 4-5 hour blocks, or even longer, each time they play. They also do things that would be hard to accept at a traditional gaming table, such as allowing a single player, or a subset of the table, to dedicate 40 minutes or even longer to deliver on a scene. Hell, sometimes a single individual or group can grab the spotlight for half the session in a single stretch.
Your game has what? Probably 2-3 hours, and there is no way players are going to be happy to sit out 40+ minutes with spotlight time focused on a player at their expense.
I’m going to come back to that problem, but for now, log in your mind that the dedication of the time to work the scenes and explore them is often as important as the acting skill on display, and that time is very much at a premium.
Pillar #3: Texture
Okay, I’m stretching my three words beginning with T here. Tone is the obvious choice, but I thought that was too limiting, so I landed on texture. When I say ‘texture,’ I mean incorporating tone, context, setting, fabric, and a whole host of other elements.
The subtle thing happening in actual plays of the Critical Role variety is the focus on the texture and the fabric of what is happening. Each player is receiving and absorbing signals from everyone else at the table and contributing within the texture of that. They’re not doing completely random things or going off on some lonely fun tangent which has nothing to do with the overall texture of the shared experience. They are adding depth, texture, and meaning to the experience through their choices.
They follow through on the shared intent, which is woven as a series of signals as the game unfolds.
For those who watch Critical Role, I think you can see the differences in this with the shift from Matt Mercer to Brenen Lee Mulligan. I feel Brennan leads a table where the texture of the experience takes precedence over raw acting. The acting talent is there, but it feels like a subtle shift in priority. The feeling and emotion of the experience is more in the mutual creation within the texture of the experience, not so much in a raw, emotional acting performance. It feels more like the players are writing in the moment than giving a raw acting performance.
We’ll come back to that as well, as writing skills are easier to find at typical gaming tables than acting skills.
Shifting the priorities
I believe being successful at the texture of your game allows you to deliver on a better time to value ratio and, in turn, shifts the delivery of meaning, depth and emotion in scenes from an acting skill to a writing skill.
If you get time and texture right, it’s not that we become acting geniuses; it’s that the scene’s intention works without us having to manifest acting skills. In short, if we address the foundation of what’s happening, time and texture, which we have the skill to tackle, the one we can’t duplicate becomes less relevant as part of the outcome.
The challenge of time
Time management at a gaming table is a very important skill. The whole table should be engaged in two constant activities: –
- Actively orchestrating spotlight time in a perfect ballet
- Trading signals of mutual creation to further build on
You also want to be able to do this in the best time-to-value ratio.
This is a good thing, but it does raise some challenges. The truth is, some of the great things you might experience solely through an acting lens can play havoc with the time-to-value ratio and a 3-ish hour session. Why? Because, on its own, getting there by acting alone takes time. It takes time for participants to realise where each person is going, interpret intent, and feel their way through it as they go through the performance. You want things to run at a certain velocity.
Even if we delude ourselves that we can act sufficiently, it can feel self-indulgent to monopolise the time to ensure scenes have that zest, purpose and meaning. While you’re doing that, other players are waiting in the wings. One thing we noticed when setting off on our 1-1 Werewolf campaign was that the scenes didn’t feel self-indulgent, as everyone playing was in play at all times. There are no other players waiting their turn or hanging on a scene taking place that has nothing to do with their experience. The whole point of the session was a series of interchanges between the two participants. It completely changed the nature of the game, especially since we are both on point with the texture of the experience.
Seek clarity early
The solution is simple: seek clarity early. Just don’t leave it vague. When the scene starts or as soon as it feels like it’s meandering, just step out for a moment and clarify. I understand some playstyles have this as an ‘immersion-breaking’ tool, but even if that’s true, I’d rather ‘suffer’ a 20-second clarification for more value per minute for the rest of it. I also notice we do this very adeptly in the 1-1 Werewolf Campaign, even more so than I do in group play.
I’d always ask myself this question: What is the difference between a character in a written medium (book or TV show) and a character played in a role-playing game? Well, characters in written media are homo fictitious; they’re not like normal folk. They’re not normal because everything they do serves their story in some way, because they’re architected and intentionally written.
Seeking clarity brings you closer to that. I clarify the purpose of each scene before it starts. If something seems to be going in a certain way, but I’m not sure, I’ll just ask. This means I can bring my character in fully to what is being explored. Is there some ‘fog of fiction or play’ that I’m breaking? I don’t think so. Why should I, as the player, be confused as to what’s going on? If I were a participant in the writer’s room for this scene, which I believe I am, I wouldn’t be sitting confused, as I’d be exploring, in context, how it will turn out. So I just clarify, all the time. This is not the same as knowing how it will end, but you need to know what the point of it is. Exploring an idea. Dealing with a specific conflict. The rest is playing to find out.
How do you clarify effectively? It helps if you have the texture sorted.
The magic of a layered texture
I’d argue that in one of the longest and most successful gaming groups I’ve been involved in, every game that succeeded was because of the mutually agreed texture, and every game that failed was a failure of texture.
Uplifting the texture of a game is a gaming experience’s superpower. When I talk about the layered texture, I mean everything that defines the game’s physical and emotional space. The tone, mood, types of themes, visual imagery, the sorts of locations, protagonists and featured sets. We can go on and on, but I think it’s very important to communicate the more ephemeral areas like themes and maybe the questions the game itself is exploring.
If this were a TV show, it’d be the series bible to make sure all the writers are on the same page.
I run games very rarely, but part of the experience for me is ensuring I can deliver on a very layered texture experience. I put a lot of thought into it. Note, I say a lot of thought, it doesn’t take a lot of effort like long documents (I may write about it a bit, but that’s just my metacognitive brain). Distilling the idea after the thought can be surprisingly simple. I put a lot of thought into this for the Werewolf: Accelerated campaign. How would it be planned through structure? What were the top 3 signature influences? There was a lot of thought put into how it felt and what the themes were that would be layered into it, right down to how people would actually talk about those things. I also do it for my player characters with a similar structure in my head most of the time.
Textual layering. Hell, in the last thing I was throwing around in my head, I was even writing down phrases people actually say in the world.
It can be achieved through casual chats, brief documents, image boards, session zeroes, and other tools many of us are familiar with. While it is always true that you find your game in play, that doesn’t mean it isn’t very important. When you do the pre-game textual layering, what you find in play is the best version of what you intended, rather than something random you might look at in the mirror and find you don’t like three sessions in.
It’s not an acting class
The tabletop role-playing experience isn’t a serialised acting workshop; it’s more like a live script read, with you writing the script in the moment.
This is my final argument before I close. The concept of viewing the tabletop role-playing experience through the lens of acting isn’t the best way to approach it. A writing lens is better, specifically like you’re involved in a script read where the script is just being created in the moment.
If you watch a script read, a few things are true. The participants are often encountering it for the first time. They’re absorbing its meaning in the moment and experiencing it with less pre-processing or artful thought, but maybe just a sense of who their character is. They’ll also engage with the framing and direction in the script by reading those bits out rather than just the spoken lines. They also do substantially less acting, as that isn’t really the goal. I feel a tabletop session feels more like that, with the hesitant, exploratory feel not coming from encountering the script for the first time, but the fact that you’re making it up on the spot.
This reinforces again that the skill needed to make the game feel more intense, emotional, and earnest isn’t acting, but maybe being able to write lines in the moment, expressed through verbalising them with a small amount of purpose that doesn’t break the meaning of the words. You need to be deep into the texture for that.
And, Finally…
So, what does valuing your time and ensuring you have the campaign’s texture sorted give you? It turns the role-playing game experience into a writing exercise rather than an acting one. It doesn’t replace one with the other; it’s about a shift in priorities. It does this because everyone at the table is confident and fluent in the texture of the game, to the point that they can create robustly in the moment and add further to the layered texture.
As a result, the experience becomes about adding to the texture rather than necessarily performing well. If you do perform at all, it’s more a level of performance you might try at work to be persuasive rather than an acting master class or an amateur dramatics disaster. The acting gets replaced with intentional creation, the words rather than the acting, descriptions as much as first-person voice. In adding to the texture rather than focusing on a first-person acting performance to layer the texture, you even start using totally new structures like describing what’s going on in your character’s head, like verbalising internal reactions to witnessed events, even if you didn’t intervene.
Adding to the texture is more like a writing exercise, you just play it out in the moment, than a constrained acting one. I think many more of us are much better at the former.