Last week I wrote about how players can encourage roleplay amongst themselves, and get to know their fellow PCs better. So what can you do as a GM to facilitate more inter-party interaction?
I think the first step is to be specific about what you want to see at your table, and to only try to tackle one type of dynamic at a time. Do you want them to collaborate more to solve problems? Have more conversations in-character? Play out their emotional responses to events more? The general wash of ‘more RP’ consists of a lot of different things, and probably will cause every player to start trying to different things that then won’t align and reinforce one another. So think about what specifically you’d like to see, or at least where you’d like to begin when building up a different table style over time.
That said, I do recommend one simple and specific starting place:
If a player wants to make an Arcana check and the wizard has Arcana expertise, suggest that they ask the wizard instead (and then feed them the information if they’d reasonably have it). Note I’m not saying force players to defer to the characters with higher skills. But rather than having them roll for information that another character would reasonably know, let that character answer it. This will nudge the characters towards having a little scene together, and will reinforce the idea that the party exists to collaborate and each contribute their own strengths, not to each take turns talking to the GM.
This connects to the idea I talked about last time: it’s a way of reminding players that the GM is not the only source of information, plot momentum, or interesting interactions. If you ‘reward’ characters for turning to one another instead of to you with free information, highlighting interesting connections between the characters, or nudging them towards opportunities they could only have achieved by putting their heads together, with time they will start doing it without your encouragement.
If players are shy about roleplay or uncertain about talking to each other, trying to force them to have fireside chats and share their feelings right off the bat is unlikely to work. This method alleviates the fear in a few ways. It gives them a specific topic of conversation with a clear outcome; it allows the conversation to take whatever form they want, be that a dialogue or saying “I ask Merlin about the mysterious runes”; and it helps avoid getting stressed by the concept of roleplay by instead turning interaction into a clear procedure. If I want something, I should check if another party member can provide it, because then I might get it without rolling. That transactional feel might get your hackles up as a DM who loves roleplay, but you have to remember that right now, your players either don’t like roleplay, or aren’t comfortable with it. Approaching it in terms of something like a mechanic is a comfort zone the whole table can understand and approach at their own pace.
With time, you can test proposing more specifically emotionally scenarios. “Bob, as a barbarian, how did you feel seeing Raven lose their temper in the marketplace like that?” or even “You know, I’d really like to see a scene at the campfire tonight where Bob and Raven discuss that moment in the marketplace, do you think they’d sit down and talk about it?”
They might say no, but you might also be surprised by a yes. And the way to make that yes more likely is to make it clear that there’s no requirement for immersive dialogue here. If they just want to narrate or even discuss the kind of conversation they have, that’s good roleplay, too—and a form of play that I find reminds people that all of this is just the same type of make-believe as describing how you chop off an enemy’s head. Maybe next time, they’ll give some dialogue a try because it doesn’t feel pressured or required to do so, it might just feel like a fun thing to try.