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The Don'ts of Roleplaying
This article is a big list of things you shouldn't do in roleplaying because, to be honest, only a wanker would do them.

Don't carry on arguing with the GM once it's obvious he won't change his mind.

Sometimes GMs and players have different opinions about how something would work. And sometimes the GM is wrong. It happens. But once you've put your point across clearly, and it's obvious that he understands but doesn't accept the argument, you just have to accept you've lost. Feel free to be bitter, feel free to take it out on him next time you're GMing, but don't carry on arguing for three hours while all the other players get pissed off.

Don't play your own speciality.

This is a personal rule of mine - I don't play biological/chemical scientists, because I am one in my day job. I know a lot about my specialist field - much more than most GMs will - and so if my character researches some problem in life science (often what a scientist character needs to do to succeed in the scenario), it's painful to me because what the GM's telling me is such obvious bullshit. I try not to raise objections where I can avoid it, but sometimes I have to. It must be hard for the GM too, because he's doing his level best to sound convincing but he just doesn't know what he's talking about.

It can be a real nightmare when the players have more specialised knowledge than the GM about something important. I remember once a science fiction game where the GM was a historian and all the players had science degrees. Generally at least once a session we ended up ripping apart what he was saying - not because we were trying to be bastards, but we just couldn't stop ourselves.

So don't play what you know. For a smooth-running game, always know less than your GM does about important stuff in the game - or if you can't manage that, at least about stuff that's central to your character.

Don't carry characters from game to game.

Sometimes people turn up to my games and pull out a character sheet from some other game, and they expect to play that character in my game. What do they think they're doing? If that character's been played in someone else's game, then he's been in a different gameworld where different things have happened. That character might have seen things happen which I would never allow to happen in my gameworld, because different GMs run the same game differently. But there's a more fundamental problem than that.

Suppose I run a game of Call of Cthulhu, and I use a commercial scenario called The Oozing Horror in which Old Man Wilkins has summoned up some hideous thing in his isolated farm near Dunwich. My players do the scenario, they go to the farm, and they kill the horror and Wilkins. Then a new player, Jim, joins the group with his old character Merkin Spile, Private Eye. Later on it turns out that Merkin Spile was himself part of a group of investigators which went to that same farm near Dunwich and killed the same Wilkins and the same creature on the same day that my party was doing it. That clearly can't happen. You see, my original group, and the group that Jim played in, were playing in different but parallel gameworlds. These two worlds were strongly similar: they contained the same farm, occupied by the same Wilkins and the same horror. But different things happened in them: different parties of investigators did the same mission in the two gameworlds. You can't then have a character cross from one to the other with experiences which contradict this world's history. It's a basic violation of reality.

But I've come across rumours of abuses worse than this. There is a particularly despicable for of behaviour that I've heard of in that lowest of all forms of roleplayer, the AD&Der. I've heard tales of players running the same character in parallel in two different games, keeping the same equipment, experience points and everything from both. So, a player (call him Jim again) is playing a character in the games of two separate GMs, Bob (on Wednesdays) and Dave (on Saturdays). On Wednesday he's in Bob's game, and ends up in some sort of underground labyrinthe which is there in the game for no explainable reason (AD&Ders are inordinately fond of this sort of thing). The game ends with him deep in the bowels of the earth. Then on Saturday, he plays in Dave's game, and is wandering through some steamy jungle somewhere and robs an abandonned temple, finding several magic items. Then next Wednesday, he's back in Bob's game, and all these new items have mysteriously appeared in his backpack. During this session he gains the 500 experience points he needed to go up another level after Saturday's game, and picks up some treasure. Then on Saturday, he's mysteriously reached a new level, even though he was 500 EXP short at the end of the last session of this campaign, and he's got a load of treasure that he never had before.

This is madness! I would never ever allow anything like this in any game I ran. Any GM who tolerates it should be taken out, given a sound beating with a sturdy piece of 4x2, and never allowed anywhere near the GM's chair of power again. If you let this sort of thing go on, it's a sign that you don't have a basic grasp of controlling the game. My advice would be to resign from GMing and hand over to someone with a bit more strength of character.

Don't use velociraptors.

Over the years, there have been many games involving dinosaurs. But nowadays they all have one thing in common - they all feel the need to include velociraptors. Before Jurassic Park, most people hadn't heard of the velociraptor, but now it's a household name and no dinosaur game feels complete without a pack of these viscious little twats in. But why? Why do we always have to use the same dinosaur? Reason suggests that there were many species of dinosaur which have never been discovered by science - why not invent some previously unheard-of species? Every time I hear the word velociraptor these days it just makes my fists itch.

When GMing, don't let the rules get in the way of sense.

Rules are written to cover some situations, usually those most likely to be encountered in a game. Reality is more complex than any set of game rules, so there are always going to be situations that the rules don't cover. You have to be able to spot these, and then decide to change the rules to cover the situation.

Here's a favourite example of mine. Imagine a sword. It's basically a sharp, three-foot-long steel bar with a comfy grip. Now imagine you swing that at somebody. Are you going to miss? Are you fuck! There's no way you're going to miss a human-sized target swinging that big piece of metal. If he doesn't get out of the way or parry the blow it's going to hit him - end of story. If you don't believe this, go and get a broom handle and hit a chair with it, and count how many times you miss - it will come to 0%.

Yet there are many games where you have to make a roll to hit. Suppose in a game you have a 40% chance to hit. What does this mean? That you just miss 60% of the time? Bullshit! What it must mean is that you opponent is doing a certain amount of dodging that's simply accepted by the game system, sometimes called 'autododge'. If this is true, then whenever someone's not doing this basic amount of dodging, rolling to hit should not be necessary. So if I'm standing behind an unmoving character who can't see me and considers me a friend, I should be able to stab him in the back without having to roll to hit.

This is only common sense. But there are GMs out there who insist on a roll to hit for situations like this. It's utterly stupid and I'm sure they must see how unrealistic it is (if they don't they need fucking shooting) but they consider that sticking with the rules as written is more important than trying to represent reality as it would be. What a bunch of arseholes.

Don't try to roleplay chatting up a woman.

You can't do this realistically. It's outside your range as an actor. If you had any trace of bird-pulling ability, you would be out there chasing women, not roleplaying. Any attempt by you to act out pulling will undoubtedly end in a horrific and dismal parody. If the GM decides to play along, and roleplay his female NPC as responding positively to your advances, this will be even more tragic and hideous - in fact the GM would be breaking the righteous law that men should never try to roleplay women. Just accept that your character is like you - his only chances for sexual relief are paying for it or using his hand.

Don't write linear scenarios.

When you write a scenario, there are basically two ways of doing it: (A) write a list of actions that the players have to go through to make the scenario work, or (B) create a situation and then let the player characters deal with it in whatever way they come up with. Only a complete arse would use the former method. A roleplaying scenario should be a challenge which the players have to use their ingenuity to solve. You don't have to work out in advance how they're supposed to do it - roleplayers are generally speaking inventive types who will think of a way of doing something if they have to.

Don't let the players play any characters they want.

There are some people who expect that any scenario should be able to run with any kind of player characters. What do these people think they are, royalty? Most scenarios are only going to work if you have the right group of characters. Note the word: a group of characters. Five characters who were created separately and have no relation to each other do not make a group.

When you write a scenario or campaign, decide on requirements for the group of PCs. Then tell them to create a group of characters to fit the bill, with characters knowing each other and having the skills which the group needs among them. Then - this is the part where so many GMs fall down - actually check the characters to make sure they do what they're supposed to. Remember you can't trust your players to do what you tell them. If one character is supposed to be a ship's doctor, check the character sheet to make sure that he's not really a psycho killer ex-special forces mercenary with a couple of medical skills tacked on.

Don't let them have what they want just because the rules say they can.

While we're on the subject of vetting your PCs, let me tell you one of the most important principles of being a GM. Just because the rules say they can have it, that doesn't mean that you should let them have it. For example - Vampire lets you create starting characters with a Discipline at 5 (for non-Vampire players, a Discipline is a superhuman vampire ability, and level 5 is shit-hard). But I would very rarely allow a character to start with a Discipline higher than 2. Players whine at this and say 'well the rules say I can have that'. At this point I generally explain to them that if they don't like it they can always go off and play someone else's game.

Don't say 'dice' when you mean 'die'.

Stupid, ignorant people think that a cube with the numbers 1 to 6 on the faces is called a dice. They are wrong. It's called a die. As a gamer, you should know this. Saying 'a dice' is a sign of being one of them, the outsiders, hoi polloi, the mundane rabble of non-gamers. You are not one of them. You should be proud to be one of us, a socially-retarded beer-belly anorak who can't get laid*, and you should mark your noble status out proudly by displaying your knowledge of the singualr form of this word. If you don't, you're a git, plain and simple.

Here's my recommended course of action for dealing with people who say 'a dice':

1. Lean close to the offender and shout 'Are you stupid as well as ugly?' directly into his face.

2. Make him wear a hat saying 'I am as thick as pigshit' for the rest of the game session.

3. Get all the rest of the players and the GM to pick on his character.

* This does not apply to the 1% of gamers who are female. They of course could get laid any time they liked, but would never dream of doing so with the bunch of geeks they choose to spend their free time with.

Don't let player characters get god-hard.

There is an unfortunate tendency in roleplaying games to let the PCs' stats keep on going up and up for ever without any end. A moment's thought will allow anyone to realise that this is ludicrous. Imagine you're playing Vampire: the PCs start off as fairly minor vampires in a city ruled by powerful, centuries-old NPC vampires. But as the campaign goes on, these PC vampires suddenly get much more powerful, while the NPCs' stats don't change. After a game-year, the PCs are now so powerful that they can take on these big hard elder vampires and defeat them. What the fuck's that all about?

From a game balance point of view, your PCs should not be allowed to get as hard as the NPCs who are supposed to be harder than them. From a realism point of view, PC stats should change only at a normal rate, the same as NPC stats, and there should be a limit to how high they can go.

How do you bring this about? The simple solution is to cut experience points (or any other stat change system) out of your game entirely. I don't care if the rules say you have to give out experience points. I don't care if your players whine about it. You just put them in their place. But if you're a soft weak GM, and you need to sweeten up your players with some tasty treats, you could keep experience points in but set iron-hard upper stat levels beyond which they may never progress. This is a weaker way of doing it, but I know some GMs lack the will to take it all the way.

Don't call the GM the DM.

In D&D and AD&D there is a functionary called the DM. This position does not exist in other games. In most the equivalent is called the GM. So why the fuck are you caling him a DM? Are you some kind of sick freak? Well... OK, you're a roleplayer, so yes you probably are. But that's not the point. There is no fucking DM in other games, so don't use that term!

If you're the GM, insist that the players refer to you as 'Lord High Supreme Sovereign of the Universe'. If they don't, make their characters have little accidents. They'll soon learn a bit of respect, and your games will run much more smoothly. As Macchiavelli said, it's better to be feared than loved, if you can't be both.