How to Get Better at Roleplaying: 9 Habits of Great RPG Players
You probably know a player like this. Their character feels like an actual person, and their choices keep kicking off whole storylines. Watch the Game Master, too: they perk up the second it's that player's turn. It's tempting to call that talent. I don't buy it. Mostly it comes down to a handful of habits, and habits can be learned.
Building EchoQuest's AI Game Master has meant months of staring at the other side of the screen, asking what a player can hand a GM that makes the next scene better. So here are nine habits that'll help you get better at roleplaying, at a table full of friends or alone with an AI Game Master at midnight.
1. Want Something Specific
The single most useful thing to know about a character is what they want right now. Not "adventure" or "justice", which are moods more than goals, but something concrete:
- "Pay off my family's debt to the Ferrier Guild"
- "Find out who sent the assassin"
- "Get the apprentice home alive"
A specific want gives the Game Master something to grab hold of, and it gives you a reason to get off your stool and act. Solo game designers figured this out years ago. In Shawn Tomkin's Ironsworn, a tabletop RPG whose digital edition is free, vows are "the core of playing": your character swears to accomplish something concrete, and the whole adventure hangs off that promise. EchoQuest's GM leans the same way. Its instructions say at least one of the choices it offers each turn has to push your active quest or the main story forward, so a clear goal gives it something to aim at. For help building goals into a character from scratch, see How to Write a D&D Backstory.
2. Play Your Flaws
Perfect characters are dull. Great players lean into their flaws: the proud knight who won't retreat, the gambler who can't walk past a card table, the healer who trusts far too easily, the thief who can't resist showing off. Flaws breed complications, and complications are where stories come from.
Tabletop designers actually reward you for this. The D&D basic rules describe a flaw as anything "that someone else could exploit to bring you to ruin", and they suggest DMs hand out inspiration when you give in to one. Fate goes a step further. When someone compels one of your aspects, you can accept the complication and pocket a fate point for your trouble. Neither game treats a weakness as a mistake. It's fuel.
On EchoQuest, put the flaw in your backstory, because the GM reads your backstory on every single turn. Then actually play it.
3. Describe Intent, Not Just Action
Compare these two:
- "I search the room."
- "I search the room for anything with the baron's seal. I think he's been forging letters."
The second one tells the Game Master what matters to you, so the result gets more interesting even when you fail. A miss might still turn up a half-burned envelope that proves nothing yet.
With an AI GM there's a mechanical reason too. When you try something risky in EchoQuest, the GM picks which stat to test and how hard the check should be, based on what you said you're attempting. "I search the room" is vague. "I'm hunting for forged letters" is plainly an investigation job, which the game treats as intelligence, and the GM can pitch the difficulty to match. That roll resolves in the same turn, so you hear straight away how your hunch played out.
4. Ask Questions
Great players are nosy, in the best possible way. They ask the Game Master and the NPCs things like:
- "What does the room smell like?"
- "Does she seem afraid of him, or of me?"
- "What do the locals say about the old mill?"
Every question is an open door for the world to show itself. GMs have known this for ages. Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World tells its GM to "ask provocative questions and build on the answers", and Phil Vecchione at Gnome Stew has a good write-up of how that plays out at a real table. Honestly, it works just as well in reverse, with players doing the asking.
AI Game Masters are especially good at answering, because they never run out of details. Smell questions land particularly well on EchoQuest. I wrote the GM's instructions with blind players in mind, so every scene has to come through sound, touch, smell and action, and asking about any of those usually gets you something rich back. When I rewrote the GM to talk like a human Game Master, I also had it end each scene on a direct question to you. It's only fair you get to fire a few back, right?
5. Talk to NPCs Like People
Please don't treat NPCs like vending machines. Ask about their lives and remember their names, then drop back in on them later. The shopkeeper you chatted with in session one could be your best informant by session ten. Or your most heartbreaking loss.
EchoQuest tracks this for real. Every named NPC holds a standing with you from -100 (sworn enemy) to +100 (loyal ally), and the GM is told to shift it whenever you meaningfully help, harm, persuade or offend someone. Kindness gets written down. So do grudges.
Voices matter here more than I expected, too. At one point I found NPC voices weren't switching at all, because their dialogue wasn't woven into the narration, so every character came out sounding like the narrator. Fixing that, and gender-matching voices across the whole catalogue, made a chat with a shopkeeper feel like talking to somebody instead of reading a menu. Distinct premium NPC voices come with the Storyteller plan.
6. Say Yes to Complications
When the Game Master throws a twist at you ("the bridge is out", "the guard recognises you"), don't hunt for a way to cancel it. Engage. The complication is the story. Improvisers call this "yes, and": accept what your scene partner offers, then build on it. Players who fight every twist end up with stalled sessions. Players who embrace them get the sessions people retell for years.
Blades in the Dark even turns this into a trade. The GM or another player can offer you a Devil's Bargain, such as collateral damage or an angry faction, in exchange for a bonus die, and you pay the price no matter how the dice fall.
EchoQuest's GM is built to hand you these. Its instructions tell it to tighten every scene with a complication, or a detail that keeps nagging, and then land on a hook. Even dropping to 0 HP doesn't end your story. You get a real setback instead, like being captured or waking hours later with a cost to pay, and nobody dies permanently. That's a complication too, so say yes to it.
7. Make Choices That Cost Something
The moments people remember come from hard choices: saving one person instead of another, or breaking a promise to keep a bigger one. When you face one, don't go looking for the loophole. Pick, and live with it.
EchoQuest does have a single-step undo on the U key. My advice? Keep it for typos and misheard voice commands, not for wriggling out of a decision you don't like. The GM is also told that past choices shape what happens now, and to bring old threads back when it hurts or helps the most, so a hard call will echo later. That's rather the point. There's more on this in Crafting Moral Dilemmas.
8. Speak in Character (a Little)
You don't need an accent or a costume. Every now and then, though, say what your character says in first person:
- "I tell him I'm a merchant." becomes
- "Merchant, friend. Just a merchant with very heavy crates."
A few lines of dialogue per scene make the whole game feel more alive. With voice input on EchoQuest, you can literally speak your character's lines out loud. Press V and talk, and the game shows you the transcript to confirm before anything reaches the GM, because speech recognition does mishear people now and then. The GM also tags spoken lines with the speaker's name, your character included, so your own words get treated as dialogue rather than stage directions.
9. Let the Story Change Your Character
The best character arcs aren't planned. They happen because of what the character lives through. Let a betrayal make your trusting healer suspicious. Let a victory make your coward brave, if only for a night. After big moments, ask yourself: how has this changed them?
On EchoQuest the game keeps a record that makes this easier to notice. When older turns scroll out of the GM's window, they get folded into a short, factual summary of your key decisions and the promises you made, so the betrayal from twenty turns back is still on the books. Your character's progress lives on the server as well, so the changed version of your healer is waiting on whatever device you pick up next.
Bonus: Habits for Solo Play With an AI GM
- Restate your goals at the start of each session, in a sentence or two
- Ask for a recap if you've been away. Just ask the GM what's happened so far, and on EchoQuest the Q, S, I and L keys read out your quests, status, inventory and location
- Tell the GM what you're enjoying so it can give you more of it
- Invite companions so there's someone to talk to on the road
Solo roleplay has a longer pedigree than people think, by the way. Ironsworn, which I mentioned earlier, is built for solo play as well as co-op and GM-led games. An AI GM simply takes over the part where you'd otherwise be running the whole world yourself.
Practice Makes Stories
Roleplaying is a skill like any other. The more you play, and the more deliberately you practise these habits, the better your stories get. An AI Game Master that's around whenever you are makes practice easy, at lunchtime or at 2 a.m. Free accounts get three campaigns and 60 AI turns a day, which is plenty of room to try out a flaw or two. So which habit are you going to test first?