Roleplaying - Encouraging and Flourishing

The discussion in another thread started veering off course, but I think I had an interesting angle, so I thought we could continue the discussion here.
This quote raises lots of interesting questions and discussion points that are worth talking about as Game Masters. Discussion that will surely only improve everyone's ability to run a game, run a game well and maximize player engagement and enjoyment. The big talking points I see are these:

(0) Why do we want players to RP? Is it appropriate for every game (group) to enforce/encourage RPing?
(1) What does it mean to RP well? When is a player RPing well and when is a player not? What are the signs?
(2) How do you encourage players to RP more often? How do you teach players how to RP better?

I'll start with my answers, but I'm curious about what everyone else does as well:

(0) I don't necessarily want players to RP. How much RPing is appropriate for a game depends on your group and the kind of game experience you are trying to facilitate. Some groups just want a tactical team game where they dive dungeons and slay dragons - with no RPing what so ever. If that's your group then it would be a bad idea to force them to RP (because that will stop them from having fun, and RPing isn't fun for everyone). If you have a group that really wants to RP, then you should provide lots of opportunity for it (otherwise they won't have fun!). If you're group is mixed, then you need to make sure each session strikes a balance between opportunities for RPing and the non-RP stuff that the other players like. I'm sure you see the common thread in my style -- as a GM I see myself as "Fun Facilitator" and so I strive to identify what each player finds fun about the game experience, and ensure that they have fun for as much of the evening as possible. That sometimes means lots of RP, and sometimes none (depends on the group).

(1) RPing well, to me, means that you "get into" your characters head and make decisions that align with that character (which may not align with yourself). Since each player designed their own character, it's not my place to decide if they are RPing well or not. There are some clear cases where players are RPing especially poorly (player knowledge vs. character knowledge cases come to mind - although I try to design campaigns to make this divide as small as possible), but even then, it's still hard to adjudicate. And, I don't see how evaluating a player's RP performance actually contributes to the game, instead I prefer to just provide opportunity to explore the character's and RP as much or as little (and as accurately or inaccurately) as players want.

(2) I start with character creation. As part of creating characters I require each player to fill out a questionnaire about their character. This identifies the characters motivations, some core aspects of their background and a framework of how their character would react in different circumstances. This questionnaire then gives the player a good sense of their character's personality, and helps them get into the character before they've even rolled a die or created a stat block. I've found it to be a really effective way to encourage and facilitate role playing.

I pretty much agree overall; however a few points of contention.

(0) Really couldn't say it better myself here; however, I am firmly in the belief that the GM should be having fun too. GMing an RPG can be a lot of work and the pay off for me is to see a story unfold and characters develop. I want to see characters make hard decisions, I am entertained by people acting a little and changing their voices (even if done poorly), and I like to see characters grow in personality and morality as much as in level. That being said I never would push this on anyone and I will run my games to encourage these things but will ultimately lead the game where the players take it. I do believe that if they really want a tactical gaming experience that there are boardgames and miniature games for that, if you are playing an RPG it should be to RP.

(1) I agree here mostly again, I just expect the players to play to alignment (if the game has such a system), and play in line with there backstory and original concept. Obviously characters should grow and change so a GM needs to be fluid with their interpretation of roleplaying. It also is generally useless to evaluate one's roleplaying or even chastise them for it, I just hand out a little bonus xp for the players that stay in line with their concept. As you mentioned its my job to provide opportunities to roleplay and doing so well will bring out the actor in even the shyest players.

(2) I always require a backstory and am a big fan of the questionare method as well. I also always do character creation as a group so that we might discuss such things ahead of time and make characters that fit well together in type and personality. Extra xp awards for good RPing and of course setting the example by rping NPCs well goes a long way toward teaching and facilitating rping.

(0) I totally agree! I often forget that I need to have fun too, because I have the most fun when I am succeeding at helping everyone else have fun (the smiles and enjoyment of my players translates into my own fun). I've trained myself to take pleasure from achieving my goal as a GM! I also like to see the story unfold, but I find that happens naturally and organically if you create a rich and fun environment (and also are practiced at keeping the game on task -- that's probably my biggest challenge. Maintaining focus from a few select players).

(1) I agree except for alignment. I find alignment to be unhelpful, misguided and a poor roleplay guide in 100% of implementations. My first houserule with such systems is usually to eliminate alignment and reconfigure any game mechanics that depend on it. Characters are far more interesting, I find, when not being held to a Good-Evil Chaotic-Lawful (or any other) system. These concepts are relative anyway. A paladin may be Chaotic in comparison to a fanatic -- and good/evil is more obviously relative. I like to play up that relativity, and free players to have their characters really get into tough moral situations. Ignoring/eliminating alignment creates an environment where that happens naturally (because characters morals etc. are defined by their actions, background and motivations not by their place on some chart).

(2) I used to require backstory, but I found it put a lot of requirement on players. That's why I moved to the "10 questions" model (and carefully chose my questions to get at motivations). I also stopped giving RP XP awards, the same players always got it (it's the wrong kind of incentive). Instead, I just RP my NCPs, and give opportunities to bring each character out to shine (which often leads the player to want to RP over time). We definitely still do character creation as a group though - that's great for lots of reasons (not all in game - it also helps everyone get to know how each other RPs and what each other wants out of the game).

I don't usually respond to writing prompts like this but being the person who introduced Expltd to the idea of RPing through introducing him to a new group I'm decidedly weighed towards RPing through a situation in game.

0: Why do I want players to RP? Simply because it is a Role-Playing-Game. To me that means that there is human interaction that goes beyond the GM telling a player what they're doing and what to kill. I always encourage and even reward RP, but I do not require it, I will throw in things for someone to do. Gaming with Expltd made me reevaluate my GM style as I was almost all RP and no combat, making a character sheet almost pointless to even have. I think all games should encourage RPing, what the players bring to the story can become more important (and better) than anything the GM could think of. It alters the way a plot unfolds as players throw in character twists and motives.

1: To RP well means that you don't use out of character knowledge as in character knowledge. Prime example is how a party interacts with a Mimic. Have any of the 1st level characters interacted with a mimic before? Probably not. Have any of your players read the monster manual? Most likely. Now the question becomes 'Are the characters treating the mimic like the box it looks like or are they treating it like a monster pretending to be a box so it can eat them?' if the answer is yes to the first than they get the point. If the answer is yes to the second the answer is that they aren't actually RPing. Any player who creates a character with some sort of personality should keep to that personality until something in game changes the character. If a player can't decide on a personality, than they can develop it in game, but it should be natural and not forced.

2: To encourage RP create situations where there is interaction between PCs and NPCs. This also gets the GM a little more involved in that having fun aspect. Engage the players in situations that will cause them to think a bit about how their characters would do things. Teaching people to RP is tricky, the best way is to create groups of gamers with a variety of skill and let them go. Keep them to task of being in a game with some plot. But until they start going on about games past let them stay in character. It can help to use character names to get players attention rather than their own names. This will help them to stay in the mindset of the game. I think that backstory is a great place to start a character. I give players a thing or two to include and then let them write, I do go over them before game to make sure that no one is meta-gaming themselves up to be a god or godlike. I don't make the players have the backstory before a game because at times without playing a character there is nothing to write or really no personality. But it helps for the player to have something to base their character off of.

Some of the things you said are interesting, I've got some followup questions:
Here you seem to suggest that RP and combat are in conflict (all RP and no combat suggests that combat is different from RP). Do you think that's true? Do you think combat is inherently less "role-playing" and more "roll-playing"? Is that necessary or an artifact of how you GM / the systems you play?
This is a comment I see often, and I too once felt this way. I think the worst rule I ever had was the GM-lightning bolt for "metagaming" where if a player egregiously meta-gamed I would roll 4d6 and deal them that much damage as "punishment" for being "out of character" (I hope everyone reading that cringed!).

Why do you think RPing and "not mixing player and character knowledge" are the same thing? Is it good RPing for a player to speak in first person (ie/ in character at the table), to act according to character motivations, and yet still slip up and anticipate a mimic? Is it even reasonable to expect players to achieve this? I mean, do you *really* know a lv1 adventurer has *never* encountered a mimic? The only way to really adjudicate this is to get players to write a comprehensive back story and carefully scan it for details.

I think a focus on "avoiding meta-gaming" directs attention away from good role playing - which is really just getting into the role of your character. Not becoming them, but just understanding them, exploring their identity and being as they are. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be aimed at the right goal (and a players best effort is great roleplaying in my books).

First group of questions: I simply felt that a game didn't need combat to be fun so I never included it. The players that I had didn't have problems with that style so I continued for quite a while without running combat. Meeting Expltd was a two way learning street. He saw what it was like to play in a group (not with me as a GM) and have role-playing combined with roll-playing. Where he placed value and excitement on something I felt to be a fairly tedious aspect of gaming I placed value on what his gaming groups almost blatantly ignored. Often in combat I fell that working as a team and role-playing fall apart; everyone charges whatever monster they feel like and sound tactics fall on deaf ears. I don't think that they are mutually exclusive but they are two separate things that over lap in one game.
Second group of questions: Not wholly and solely are they the same thing. It is the biggest thing that will detract from playing a character from what I've seen. If a person isn't using what their character knows, then they're almost cheating. I set up my games to keep the players interested, keep a good story, to let the players have fun, and to hopefully challenge the characters they have sent into the worlds I create. I don't want to throw in a conflict and have people essentially cheat their way through it because it was in the last guys game or some such thing. Most people in a medieval/renaissance world do not travel, they keep to towns and the area the know because this is safer for them. Regular people who have been to the next town are rarer, people who have been farther almost unheard of. And this is just in our own history. Our worthy adventurers may have done something but being level on it isn't much. They may have killed some Goblins or other low level thing. It is highly unlikely to have a full party of level one characters who have all encountered a mimic.

My focus isn't on ''avoiding meta-gaming'' its in creating a game were new players are on equal footing with the long time campaigner. I've seen a new player set an assassin vine on fire because he had no idea that it had fire resistance. It was almost a TPK and actually funny to the party after they survived. Not meta gaming creates a smoother and more believable story for most people.

First group of questions: I simply felt that a game didn't need combat to be fun so I never included it. The players that I had didn't have problems with that style so I continued for quite a while without running combat. Meeting Expltd was a two way learning street. He saw what it was like to play in a group (not with me as a GM) and have role-playing combined with roll-playing. Where he placed value and excitement on something I felt to be a fairly tedious aspect of gaming I placed value on what his gaming groups almost blatantly ignored. Often in combat I fell that working as a team and role-playing fall apart; everyone charges whatever monster they feel like and sound tactics fall on deaf ears. I don't think that they are mutually exclusive but they are two separate things that over lap in one game.
Second group of questions: Not wholly and solely are they the same thing. It is the biggest thing that will detract from playing a character from what I've seen. If a person isn't using what their character knows, then they're almost cheating. I set up my games to keep the players interested, keep a good story, to let the players have fun, and to hopefully challenge the characters they have sent into the worlds I create. I don't want to throw in a conflict and have people essentially cheat their way through it because it was in the last guys game or some such thing. Most people in a medieval/renaissance world do not travel, they keep to towns and the area the know because this is safer for them. Regular people who have been to the next town are rarer, people who have been farther almost unheard of. And this is just in our own history. Our worthy adventurers may have done something but being level on it isn't much. They may have killed some Goblins or other low level thing. It is highly unlikely to have a full party of level one characters who have all encountered a mimic.

My focus isn't on ''avoiding meta-gaming'' its in creating a game were new players are on equal footing with the long time campaigner. I've seen a new player set an assassin vine on fire because he had no idea that it had fire resistance. It was almost a TPK and actually funny to the party after they survived. Not meta gaming creates a smoother and more believable story for most people.

This and thinking they could take a dire boar since another character said "of course we can take it" were some fantastic moments early on!!

Those kinds of moments are excellent, and memorable - and really, at the end of the day that's the marker of success (for me anyway). When I meet up with old friends and hear them still talking about that D&D game with the pirate ship heist that went really bad really fast, the DM of me inside smiles. And really, those memories have nothing to do with the mechanics (that particular one that comes up from time to time was actually in the middle of our D&D 4.0 game, a system we disliked at that point and eventually moved away from). But I think that's a side point (maybe a discussion topic for elsewhere if any are interested -- it's the primary reason why I've been moving away from more mechanically rich games to lighter, faster, and more story-driven systems like Wushu and Mouse Guard).
I've had this experience as well. I often try to reflect on *how* to make this problem better. I mean, there's no principled *reason* why combat needs to be "roll-playing" and non-combat is "role-playing". There are some players who get into character and you never seem them break that divide, but by far the most common case is for players to naturally "change gears" when miniatures hit the table and dice start getting rolled.

One way to try and close the gap is to discourage "metagaming" - by making players stay in character, even in combat scenarios, you remind them that they are roleplaying even while fighting (Mimic's or Dire Boards or Assassin Vine's). I had lukewarm results with that approach, and starting adopting different strategies. I tried roleplaying XP awards for RP in combat, which didn't work very well. My most recent effort was to give players a questionnaire at character creation, which I think is good practice (a better starting point than a full on backstory), and I've included in that questionnaire two critical questions to try and "bring the character back into the combat":

5. Your character has been ambushed by a trio of brigands. They draw their weapons and move to attack. How does your character respond?

6. Your character has offended a nobleman, who is now threatening to summon the town guards. How does your character respond?

I tailor the specifics of the question to the campaign, but you can get the gist. I'm basically asking the players to reflect on how their character would act in a typical combat and a typical social encounter. Their answers to these questions provide a reference point for roleplaying in combat and social encounters. I've had pretty good success with this so far too. It's been by far the most effective strategy for getting more "role" playing when we're doing a lot of "rolling".

Immersion is really only one aspect of one kind of roleplaying. Some people roleplay to make interesting scenes, and don't find immersion intrinsically interesting. Interesting scenes can arise while immersed, but a lot of dramatic devices, like irony, are only really enjoyable to all involved if the player is acting in character but is not the character.
For me, I want roleplaying to the extent that it gets players into the theme and tropes of the game. We've all been in games in which one or more people just aren't bought in and are making choices that clash with what everyone else had in mind. I don't think it's a good idea to try to enforce adherence to theme and mood and the like, but if someone isn't a conversation should take place to make sure everyone is on the same page and interested in the same game.
As implied above, if someone is making choices that tie into the theme and tropes and mood of the game, then they're roleplaying well. If someone is being jokey when the mood is serious, or is saving themselves when the mood is heroic, then there's at least a disconnect that should probably be looked at. But there are lots of ways to behave in a way that conforms to what the game is about.
The thing is: even that can be roleplaying. If, say, the fighter is bashing, the thief is backstabbing, the wizard is manipulating and the cleric is healing, then the players are making the exact same choices their characters would make, and they're definitely adhering to the tropes of the game.
Right! I can make a decision that my character would make, even if I'm not "into" its head. The trouble some people have with that is that if the player doesn't block out all the player knowledge then they might wind up in the position of forcing themselves to do something they know is a bad idea. "My character would barge right through that door, but I know it's probably trapped" is a common one. The GM is miffed because the players are avoiding the trick via player knowledge, rather than what the character would do - which might not allow a way to notice the trap.

Again it's about incentives. The more incentive a player is given to use player knowledge, the less they are going to want to ignore it for the sake of going along with what the game is about.
I've stopped caring what knowledge characters have. If a player wants their character to know something or act as if they know something, I no longer have a problem with that, and like you I don't base my games heavily around things needing to be secret. The problem of metagaming disappeared almost overnight.
I admire this approach. As long as players are playing along with the game, I don't care if it's because that's what the character would do, or because it's that the player knows that's what the character would do.

It seems to me as though everyone charging the monster they feel like is more "roleplaying" than working out sound tactics. It depends on the game, though. Is the game about adventure and risk, or is it about planning and tactics? Games can become different things, based on who has what incentive to do what. On a party scale, if no one has incentive to forget their player knowledge in a situation, no one will. On an individual scale, people want different things from their games. Some people want action right now, regardless of the risk, others like to "solve" situations upfront.

I did cringe at the mention of "GM-lightning bolt." Again, incentives. In that case the GM is trying to provide a greater negative incentive for not roleplaying than whatever negative incentive is keeping the player from roleplaying. If I know a box is a mimic, but I think it might only do 8 or 9 points of damage to me before it's dealt with, then it just makes good sense to have my character "fall for it" rather than risk 4d6 damage from the GM.

And that can work. Other people use positive incentives, like extra XP, but again that's just an effort to offset the existing negative incentive. I prefer to remove the negative incentives as much as possible. I don't want a player to fall for a mimic unless the player thinks it would be more fun (not just less unfun) to fall for it than not. I don't even want there to be a mimic in the scene, if it's not likely to be fun for the player or players.

I wrote the above before I even read the following:
This is exactly what I'm saying. If there are negative consequences for roleplaying, then neither punishments nor rewards are going to be permanent fixes to the situation.

I think the questionnaire approach works for you, because it makes things a little more concrete for the players. But I wonder if you've ever have someone rue an answer they gave, or try to twist out of it, because their answer would seem to force them to do something that they think will kill their character or otherwise make the game less fun.