Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

Do you enjoy acting out your character’s words, even adopting a different voice for your character? Do you hate it when people do that? When I got back into gaming a few years ago, I noticed that “amateur thespianism” has become one of the things in role-playing games that a certain sort of player now complains about. Thespianism means acting. We are told that acting has no place in “old-school” play. As an old-time player, this made no sense to me. Sure, everybody has play-style preferences, but I never saw a role-playing game in which players did not dip into acting out their characters at least occasionally. It was not as if my games were degraded by that, either. Putting down acting in a role-playing game seemed odd to me. So, I decided to figure out where the negative attitude toward this part of the hobby, which I thought to be essential, came from. This post looks at the phenomenon of disdain for acting out a part in role-playing games and the claim, explicit or implied, t