These tips were pulled from a post I put together over on EN World called “RP Prompting and Immersion”. Here, I expand upon them further.
Realistically Meaningless Actions
One of the things in life that occurs all the time but rarely makes it into movies or tv shows (or our games) are the little gestures we make, or things we say that go nowhere or have no importance to the current conversation. When we don’t include these things from time to time, it can feel like any action, no matter how small, MUST be important to the story. Otherwise, why employ it.
By bringing these aspects of life into you game you can not only add a bit of reality to your game, but you can also use it as a tool to draw attention to character aspects that will help a player with character immersion.
SIDE NOTE: I would quickly mention two shows that immediately come to mind that did things like this (focused, very briefly on things that were insignificant to the story, but gave you tiny bits of insight into their characters) – “Seinfeld” and “Rosanne”.
One example is to have an NPC call attention to something (naturally in conversation) that is part of a player’s character. It can be just about anything, and can include things the player never detailed, like a tunic, or the presence of leaves and webs on their clothing for example…
NPC to PLAYER 1: “You have some crud on yer back my friend”, he steps to your side and brushes off what appears to be a few leafs and webs, “You must have been walking through the brush.”
It adds a bit of realism or life to a conversation (which is great on its own merit). More importantly, it also calls out character details that will likely illicit a response of some kind, of which the player will feel more compelled to answer from the characters point of view (in my experience) since attention was drawn to it in-game.
The great thing about this is they are easy to come up with on the fly, and done very quickly.
SIDE NOTE: Something quick like this is especially nice when the room gets quiet during a PC to NPC conversation – use it to fill those long silent moments while a PC ponders his/her next actions, etc.
Great advice. I agree wholeheartedly
The first couple of times you do this, it can be jarring to players who are used to just “phoning it in”, but they get used to it soon enough. One great thing is, the more you perform these little innocuous details, the more comfortable the players are in the world — which helps to create strong connections to the characters which populate it. When events occur that matter to the NPCs, the players will feel for them.
This was an amazing thing to witness: Once, when an oft-kind shopkeeper (!) fell ill and his son took the reins of the shop, a player’s shadowdancer (!) looked stricken by the information and sincerely asked if there was anything he could do to help. I was shocked — a great DM moment, for sure.