How to Be a Better D&D Player: 4 Skills Not in the Player's Handbook

Nobody teaches you how to be a good player. They hand you a character sheet, tell you "you can do whatever you want!" and assume you'll figure the rest out. Most players don't adopt the rest until they're two years in.

How to be a better D&D player comes down to four learnable skills (and not one of them is about being a good actor): making the choices your character would make, handing your GM a backstory they can build on, playing in a way that sets up others, and bringing your own goals instead of only reacting. None of them require a drama degree or a 300-page character bible, and not one of them comes in the box. But they are small things you can practice that will add tons to your game.

Skill 1: Make the Choice Your Character Would Make (Not the One You Would)

Most "how to roleplay" advice starts in the wrong place: voices. Accents, funny faces, a growl for the half-orc. What's more important is making the choice your character would make instead of the choice you would make. Plenty of the best roleplayers at a table never do a voice. They just say what their character does, and it lands as unmistakably that character every time.

D&D Beyond's roleplaying guide puts the foundation plainly: "If you start with a solid understanding of who your character is, what they want, what makes them tick, roleplaying becomes a lot easier." That understanding is the engine, and it runs on specifics: your character's flaws, the values they hold, and the things they want badly enough to make a mistake over. Knowing those, the question in front of you stops being "what's the optimal play" and becomes "what would she actually do here."

The descriptive approach works as well as the theatrical one, and better for a lot of tables. "She eyes the guard, then makes a show of getting interested in the crates by the wall. She's stalling so she can count them." That is roleplay. You made a decision in character and told the table about it, and nobody had to perform. The EN World forums describe the same move in their own words: "describe what they do including a goal and approach," what they want and how they set about getting it.

Before your next session: Run your character through three quick moments. Don't reach for the smart answer or what you would do, reach for the honest one your character would.

• A stranger with nothing to offer begs the party for help, and helping means a detour out of your way. Do you offer to help, push to move on, or wait and follow the group?
• Someone they respect calls one of their choices stupid to their face. Do they snap back, go cold, or laugh it off?
• They're offered exactly what they want by someone they shouldn't trust. Do they take it, refuse on principle, or get it without owing anything?

There's a big catch worth mentioning. "It's what my character would do" is the most argued-over sentence in the hobby. Said one way, it is the whole skill: you made a hard, in-character choice and held to it even though it cost you something. Said another way, it is the murderhobo's favorite excuse they drop right before they rob the questgiver, knife a party member, and torch three buildings and/or sessions of everyone else's story. The difference isn't whether the choice fits your character. It's whether it respects that four other people are trying to tell this story with you. Good "it's what my character would do" serves the story. Bad "it's what my character would do" makes the whole table about you. Being in character is never a license to wreck the game.

Skill 2: Write a Backstory Your GM Can Actually Use

A twenty-page backstory might be impressive solo writing. At the table, it's nearly useless. The backstory your GM can actually work with is shorter, leaves threads dangling, and hands them things to pull.

Start from what a GM is looking for when they read your backstory. They're not grading your prose, they're hunting for hooks they can drop into the campaign. Tribality frames it well: "Give your GM a brief backstory with narrative hooks that they can use to involve, intrigue, and envelop your character in the events of your campaign." Three concrete hooks do more work than twenty pages of lore. A living NPC with a reason to come looking for your character. An unresolved question your character hasn't had the courage to face yet. A personal want that collides somewhere with the shape of the current campaign. Those three hooks give the GM something to reach for when they're building a session.

The good kind of hook even has a name in the hobby. Knife theory comes from a 2017 D&D forum post that has been passed around GM circles ever since, and it has a sharper word for these hooks: knives. A knife is anything that lets a threat land on this character in particular. A sibling who could be taken, a debt that could come due, a fear that could be cornered, an old crime that could resurface. As one widely shared version puts it, knives are things players "lovingly forge ... and present to the DM so that the DM can use them to stab the player over and over again." Hand over one or two and the GM has to strain to give you a personal stake. Hand over half a dozen, spread across people, regrets, and unfinished business, and you're in the middle of nearly every scene that matters.

One more move multiplies all of it: tie one of your knives to another player's character. A shared past, a debt running between the two of you, or a secret one of you is keeping gives the GM a thread anchored at both ends, and it hands the table a bond the two of you didn't have to fake.

The trap is treating backstory as a complete solo story, one that's already finished before the campaign begins. A closed story has no threads. Bell of Lost Souls confirms this pattern with five ways to build hooks without an elaborate backstory, and every one of them is about leaving something open, not closing something off.

Before your next session: List five knives your character will give to the GM. If you can only scrape together one or two, the backstory is still too closed off to use and needs a little more juice. Five is a great starting place and gives your GM plenty to reach for. (Even if you're mid-campaign, you might be able to still add knives!)

That handoff is exactly what Inkless built Character Forge for. It's a guided way to build a character that pulls those hooks out as you go, and because it's collaborative with your GM, the living NPC and the open thread land in front of the person running the world instead of dying in a doc nobody reopens.

Skill 3: Play "Yes, And" to Set Up Everyone Else

The common version of this advice is "don't hog the spotlight," and it's fine as far as it goes. The Gamer has the vocabulary for the failure mode: main character syndrome, they try to pick the lock the rogue was reaching for, turn every shopkeeper into a solo scene, and talk over the quiet folks without ever meaning to. But "take up less room" is a low bar, and quickly equates to "be quiet at the table". And that's not what we want either...

The skill is "yes, and." It comes from improv, and most people who quote it only remember the "yes." The "yes" is accepting what another player puts on the table instead of blocking it. The "and" is the part that matters: you add to it, you push it somewhere, you hand it back bigger. At a game table that means playing your own character in a way that hands the other players and the GM exactly what they need to do the thing they were trying to do.

It looks like small moves. The bard's player cracks a joke; instead of topping it, your fighter plays the straight man and the bit lands twice as hard. The rogue is casing the vault; your wizard asks, in character, "Wait, weren't you arrested for something exactly like this?" and suddenly it's their scene. The GM dangles a mysterious letter; you accept it even though you know you shouldn't and it leads to a great place. None of that is stepping back. It's leaning in on someone else's behalf.

Aimed well, "yes, and" is the difference between five people sharing a table and five people building one story. You can do it from inside your character the whole time, and you're not trading away your own fun to do it. The table where everyone plays this way is the best table to sit at.

Before your next session: Pick one other player whose character has been quiet lately. Go in ready with one move that puts them in the spotlight. Ask them a question only their character can answer, or a setup only they can pay off.

Skill 4: Be Proactive, Not Just Reactive

Every player reacts. The GM drops a problem, you respond, and that's the basic loop of the game. Nothing wrong with it, it's the pattern drilled into beginner players. But the Indie Game Reading Club names the gap: most players never do anything else. They wait for the table to hand them a situation, and only then do they move. The other half of the skill is being proactive and walking in with something your character actually wants to accomplish this session. A small, specific thing: Mira wants to find out if the harbormaster is lying, Corven needs to apologize to that merchant before it gets weird. Goals that don't railroad anything, but add a little spice to the game.

It just means you're not waiting for the table to entertain you. You're bringing something to it. I bet even your GM will thank you!

The mechanical layer of prep is the one most cited, and it's still real: know your spells and abilities before it's your turn, because nothing deflates a tense moment faster than two minutes of rules lookup while everyone waits. Review your notes from last session. Reread your ability list for five minutes before you sit down.

But prep isn't only mechanical. Full Moon Storytelling's player prep guide points to something useful: identify something your character hasn't done recently that they care about, and plan to do it. It turns passive session attendance into intentional play.

Before your next session: Decide on one thing your character wants to find out or do. Keep it small, and specific, and fun.

If you want a lightweight system for capturing notes at the table, A Player's Bullet Journal for Your TTRPG Campaign is a good starting point.

Being A Player Is a Craft

The game gives you a character sheet, a spell list, and a dice bag. It doesn't hand you the parts that turn you from a typical player into an amazing one. They're craft. Craft is learned. It doesn't come in the box.

If you're reading this because a quieter player keeps missing their moments, or your GM hasn't touched your backstory in fifteen sessions, or you've caught yourself making the optimal call instead of your character's call: noticing it is the first skill. Players who get better are the ones paying attention to the whole table, not just their own character sheet.

If your table keeps losing the threads between sessions, Inkless is the collaborative notes app built for exactly that. Players get their own space alongside the GM's, so last session's details are findable by everyone, not just the one person who wrote them down.

Want a one-page session prep checklist to bring all four skills to your next game? Grab the Player Session Prep Sheet at inkless.app/resources/how-to-be-a-better-d-and-d-player.

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Sources - EN World: Player Responsibilities (thread 674815) - EN World: "It's What My Character Would Do" (thread 716178) - D&D Beyond: How to Get Better at Roleplaying in D&D - Tribality: Create a backstory that is good both for you and your GM - Bell of Lost Souls: D&D Five Ways To Give Your Character Interesting Plot Hooks (Sep 2025) - The Gamer: Main Character Syndrome in D&D - Indie Game Reading Club: Proactive vs Reactive Characterization - Full Moon Storytelling: How players should prepare before their next TTRPG session (Apr 2025)