How do you up your game emotionally as a roleplayer, tapping more authentically into your characters’ emotional states and responses? I think this is actually quite a complicated question, and one that highlights some of the really interesting differences in play styles and play formats.
To get it out of the way first thing, there is absolutely no need to be a talented professional-level actor at your average home table. If you aspire to be an AP performer, it’s a different question—a higher standard of acting talent is very helpful, though I’d argue also not necessarily required. In addition, if this is an element of play that someone is really interested in, it’s worth it to consider taking some acting and improv classes, which will teach you techniques but more importantly give you a focused space to practice them and get feedback to help you develop.
However, my hot take is that the best actor at the table is rarely the best player, because being fully immersed in your characters’ emotions isn’t actually conducive to flexible, collaborative storytelling.
The example of this that always comes to mind for me is a player’s reaction to their PC’s sibling’s death in Dimension 20’s A Crown of Candy. I have a lot of views on how I don’t think the players were set up for success in that season, but it was very clear that they weren’t prepared for how to cope with their first encounter (in the series, anyway, I can’t speak for their home games) with mid-series, permanent PC death. The PC whose sibling died was completely unable to break out of a very authentic performance of anger and grief, and directed a lot of vitriol towards the PC she perceived as taking her sibling’s place, to the point where it was very clearly hurting the other player’s feelings, and the inability to ‘meta-game’ and accept this new character fully into the party quickly really dragged down the tone and, at least for my tastes, had negative impacts on the storytelling. It was probably the more emotionally real and grounded choice, but the inability to look beyond the character’s emotions and make the choices that would help with party cohesion and the advancement of the story were seriously damaging to both.
So while there’s a lot to be learned by exploring conventional acting techniques, the ways I’d suggest tapping into characters’ emotions at the TTRPG table are somewhat different, and it’s for every individual person to decide what their expressive goals actually are. Do you want to improvise really immersive, emotional scenes? Do you want to be quicker on the draw and more expressive when describing your character’s mental state? Do you want to make character choices that are more rooted in their emotions?
All that said, I think these suggestions can be the foundation for almost anything related to deepening your awareness of and connection to your character’s emotional state, while still retaining enough distance to be a helpful big-picture storyteller and collaborator.
When you are studying acting, most of what scene study comes down to in contemporary acting methods is practicing listening, and this is the part of studying acting that is most useful for TTRPGs. Just delving into your character’s feelings and closing yourself off to everything else happening at the table, or not responding to what’s actually going on, is obviously useless. So the first step in deepening your emotional engagement with a character is, maybe ironically, to stop thinking about them so much and really key into listening and hearing and taking in the things that are happening at the table. Work towards noticing the details and the nuances of the things other players and the DM are saying, and opening yourself up to having whatever your own, authentic reaction is to them before you begin trying to translate that into how a character might feel.
Another method, or a next step, is to be unafraid of talking through what your character is feeling. As a player, I always feel way more connected to characters when their player opens up their thought processes to me, narrates what they’re thinking and feeling, and then tells or shows me how they react. Opening a character up beyond the surface-level view isn’t just nice for the other players, though. The process of talking through and narrating their emotions helps you discover what they are and therefore how to bring them into the scene.
Think about what you do when you’re in a tricky encounter in a game. You might be, or at least have played with, the type of person who talks out their options: “If I grapple him, then he won’t be able to go attack our wizard, but then I’m missing the chance to break his concentration on that spell…”
How your character feels is just another part of the game, and it’s equally valid (and fun!) to talk out their emotions in the same way: “Being insulted by the guards like that might make me really angry… but on the other hand, they’re implying that we’re cowards, and I think I might still be feeling really self-conscious about how we had to flee that last fight, so maybe I don’t say anything… yeah, I think in this moment, we don’t want to start a fight with the guards, so I don’t say anything, but you see me sort of shrink in on myself and look ashamed, which maybe isn’t quite how you’d expect me to normally react to being insulted like that.”
As I hope this example very briefly shows, connecting emotionally to your character doesn’t have to be about launching into a big dramatic scene, but just about building up your instincts for letting your awareness of your character’s emotions—in combination with your awareness of the needs of the scene and story—guide your choices in the same kind of ways you think about which of your character’s abilities would be appropriate for a certain moment or would lead to an interesting outcome.
This might feel counterintuitively distancing, but I really encourage you to try it, because the more you do it, the more powerful it becomes as a tool for authentically connecting to your characters’ emotions. There are two times that linger in my mind when I was completely blindsided by my emotional response to a scene as a player, and both times, it was when I was just narrating the characters’ feelings in more or less this way during a culminating scene. Speaking through their emotionally processes, describing how I imagined they must feel, just snuck up on me and made me start feeling it without even having to try.
One of my major frustrations when I was trying to be an actor was that I simply couldn’t cry on cue, which was ironic because I cry at everything in real life. Letting the story, the play, and the game come first—just talking about how your characters feel without trying to force yourself to feel it immersively—is a surprisingly powerful tool.