Tricking you into Roleplaying

One thing that some people complain about in RPGs is a lack of roleplaying in their games, IE the players just want to fight or they don't seem to know how to 'play' their characters. Encouraging players that are either disinterested in it or inexperienced can be tricky. They might fear causing trouble in a game or they might not see a point to it. There are little ways, give players some kind of incentive to write backstories or roleplay but of course this can be imperfect as well. Do you reward someone for playing a jerk and how do you avoid players trying to 'game' their histories to justify overpowered things?

Believe it or not Deadlands came up with a way to deal with this again and evne managed to make it integral to the game. It starts in character creation, if you want any of the edges (including arcane backgrounds) you need to take flaws. These flaws offer ways to define a character, are you a drunk, unlucky? Maybe your character is a hero, someone who can't turn down a call for help. Perhaps they're utterly loyal to those around them, willing to follow a close friend to the gates of hell and back. Maybe they have an oath they took to do something or not to do it. In short the flaws represent traits of a character and end up either being a handle that someone can yank or a mechanical risk. There are a few exceptions, Death Wish and arguably Grim Servant o' Death being among them.

The big reason it works is this, it manages to actually sidestep many of the traditional problems in games where flaws exist. Consider games that have flaws, frequently players will either take flaws that are very unlikely to come up (IE the archer sucking at melee or spellcasting), have little impact, or the character might sidestep/ignore some of the social flaws. In Deadlands though things work a little differently, see in Deadlands your flaws can actually be a bit more important than any of your edges, and far more valuable.

In Deadlands you got fate chips three ways. One was simply that everyone drew 3 fate chips from the pot of fate (sometimes more or less depending on edges and flaws). The second was as a reward for defeating challenges based on the difficulty thereof. The final bit, and this is probably the most important, is from having your flaws cause you trouble. See, the more your flaws caused you and your friends trouble the more that fate rewarded you. Get a bit inconvenienced, white chip, get in some trouble you got a red chip, end up in a situation where you nearly died or blew an investigation because of your flaw, blue chip.

This actually did a few things, my own group wasn't huge into roleplay but roleplay, especially roleplay where your flaws got you in trouble, got you more chips that could feed powers, negate wounds, restore wind, or just get turned in for bounty points. Your flaws were a means to grow, sure feel free to take flaws that will rarely ever come up, fine with me, it just means that you won't advance as fast as the other players and that you might run out of chips when you're fighting a group of trigger happy bandits or facing down some hell-spawned abomination. Now on the other hand, maybe someone would take flaws that would make trouble for the group, earn a good chunk of chips but make things terrible for the rest of the group. Well at that point maybe they decide to fit your character with a hemp necktie or just bury them in the desert near an anthill with a trail of honey leading to their mouth. Flaws, and having the flaws affect your character, meant you had to roleplay them, had to take consequences but that you also could get some nice stuff out of it.

The second thing that helps bring roleplay in for the game is simply the Veteran edge. Veterans of the Weird and Wasted West (Or Way Out if you play Lost Colony) had to write a 1-3 page backstory for their character, what they faced, what they learned and generally what they did to earn those extra character points. Now it also comes with a random set of kicks to the head on a special table (but the Marshal is encouraged to come up with something unique if they get an idea that fits better or is more interesting than the stuff on the chart.) The backstory helps them ground themselves a bit in their character, get an idea for who the character is and where they came from. It also helps the Marshal out because they can take elements from the writeup and use it to help make the characters feel more a part of the world. In fact one of my favorite things from the campaign that I'm wrapping up was an enemy of one of the players, an enemy that in fact caused him to start on the path to becoming a Texas Ranger and ultimately to be taken down by the posse (with disturbing ease, I have one helluva tough group)

All of this together makes situations where the players will probably WANT to roleplay. And even if it starts out more as them trying to acquire chips they can come to enjoy interacting with the people that populate the game world. At least that's my view of the whole thing. Many other games I have played that use flaws and similar things have trouble on this front, I think this is part of why I'm such a fan of the classic Deadlands games but any other systems out there that offer this are of interest. Have fun and may you rarely fumble.