Run Your Lines
I'm currently in rehearsal for a play. There's a pretty clear through line from my love of theatre and acting to my love for RPGs. It's so fun to get to be "all the bad guys." So, what better source of experience to pull from for the Player Advice Blogwagon?
When I was fresh to these games, I scoured the internet for advice, and to the point of the blogwagon: there were countless resources for GMs, and a whole lot less for players. I was terrified of freezing up, and not knowing what to say. My list of worries about making the 'wrong' or a 'bad' choice was long and salient. I once wrote in a question to Adventuring Academy, hoping that Lou Wilson would tell me how to find the confidence to make big, bold swings like he regularly did.1 A few years back, I took improv classes, not exclusively but in no small part specifically, to bring what I learned back to RPGs, because as I always joked, "When I'm in a play, if you don't like what I say, that's the script's fault, not mine. In improv, I have to make up the words as well as perform them? Terrifying!"
That's still true. I'm working on it. But as that joke hides, making up the words isn't the end of the work. If I got up, and read lines from a script flatly, without putting any work into making them interesting, no sense of the surrounding context, it'd be a terrible performance.
Which is why, as I mentioned up top, I'm in rehearsal right now. I'm performing the same scenes over and over and over. You have to learn your entrances and exits, make sure you look interesting, keep the audience's attention, give your scene partners what they need, and most importantly for the context of this post: discover the best way to say your lines.
Rough estimate: Staring with the first time we got together as a cast and read through the script, and looking forward to our final rehearsal, I'll have said my character's lines (all ~2,000 words of them) 16 times, at minimum. When you add in all the repetition from memorization done on my own time, that number easily crests 100. Maybe 200.
When you say something that much, especially knowing that it's for other people to eventually hear, that is a tremendous amount of opportunities to discover just how many different ways you can say it.
My advice to players: Run your character's lines.
If you can picture a situation they're likely to encounter, or even better, the sort of moment that you picture defining this character, imagine what they might say.2 First thought best thought, doesn't need to be perfect. You have it? Great! Say it again. Again. Again. Try emphasizing a different word in the sentence each time. What emotion did you come in with the first time? Pick something else. What if you're distracted? Terrified? Exhausted? Angry? Anxious?
Some options will be silly. Some will make no sense. Some will make you realize how much you want to use a different word, or change the order of how you said it.
Perfect. Every feeling you have is more that you know about your character. It doesn't matter if you never say the actual words. It doesn't even matter if that situation you imagined never actually comes up. What matters is that you're no longer encountering these thoughts for the first time as you're in the moment. You've explored them. You're ready for them.
You'll have run your lines, and they'll be there when you need them.
🐝