Role-Playing Speech

On Monday, March 18th, at approximately 9:00am, I am giving a demonstrative speech in front of my Public Speaking class. Am I nervous? A bit, but I have my confidence that it will all go well.

The speech is on tabletop role-playing, or more specifically, to provide the audience with insights on effectively participating in a tabletop role-playing game. I know it probably sounds silly. I mean, I'm talking to them about how to play a game. How hard can playing a game be, right?

Well, luckily for me, there are plenty of facets and aspects to playing a tabletop RPG, and these are all aspects that a lot of people, even seasoned veterans, overlook from time to time. Avoiding meta-gaming, avoiding being a rules-lawyer, playing the game for the story and not for personal glory, and understanding that the group is trying to have fun together, are all things that are easy to forget when you roll your fourth failure for the night, or when your armor breaks at the most inopportune time.

More importantly, my hope is that I will show to the audience the benefits of tabletop role-playing, especially to those who have never experienced it before. Tabletop RPGs have a strong social stigma that permeates their existence, and when people hear RPG they often think of Dungeons and Dragons, and from there they often think of anti-social tendencies, along with many other stereotypes. Hopefully I will help them look beyond those stereotypes, and see tabletop gaming as something that everyone and anyone can enjoy.

I plan to do all three of my speech assignments this semester on tabletop role-playing, and my next one, the Informative Speech, will be on running a game session as a Game Master. This will be more difficult than my current speech, since I cannot use visual aids in any way. However, I feel that conducting a speech on being a Game Master and using only my words and my actions to inspire and engage is something that being a Game Master has prepared me for. I already plan on using the entire space open to me, not just the front of the class, and to bring my kinetic energy and desire for movement to the table.

Hopefully I can make some sort of lasting impression.