How to Be a Good Roleplayer

What is roleplaying?

Roleplaying in an OpenRPG sense is not like playing an RPG on your computer or console, such as Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy, or others. In OpenRPG, you create a character with a unique personality, who is not you. Some people suffer a misconception that to roleplay is to put yourself in someone else's body in another place. That it not true; it is more like acting, only you are making up the character and the script as you go. There's nothing wrong with playing a character who is totally different than you, even of the opposite gender; it's an interesting excercise to try and think like another person.

What is good roleplaying?

Good roleplaying does not mean that your character is incredibly powerful or "cool"; it means that the storyline which is being built is has convincing, interesting characters. One of the biggest rewards of roleplaying is being able to tell the stories of just what kinds of crazy troubles and adventures your character got in; nobody cares that you beat up a red dragon, but they might think it's pretty funny if you tell them about the time you accidentally sliced through the bartable with your Sword of Sharpness +5. When roleplaying, the choices you make are not necessarily the safest ones, or the most effective ones, but the ones that your character is likely to choose -- more concisely, the choices with the most character. This does not mean killing every storeowner you come across, just because "you're evil" -- such characters are not likely to live long and thus are little fun to roleplay, and they tend to ruin the rest of the game.

What are the pitfalls?

In a roleplaying game, the most pernicious problems are almost always the result of a player or players that do not maintain the separation between what is the game, and what is real life. The term that covers this broad class of roleplaying "sins" is "metagaming." Metagaming most commonly manifests itself in several specific ways, listed here in order of what is generally least harmful to generally most harmful.

Bringing personal feelings into the game. This occurs when a player takes their personal feelings about another player, or in some circumstances feelings about the game itself or issues that that the game brings up, and allows those feelings to dictate the feelings of their character. This is generally the least harmful to the game experience. In many circumstances, players that do not get along will have characters that do not closely work together, which may be the result of this type of metagaming, but has little negative effect on the game. There are other circumstances where this can be more harmful, for instance when players dislike an element of the game or its plotlines and express this through their character in a negative way intended to damage that element.
Bringing out of character knowledge into the game. For any game that involves antagonism between the characters, it is essential that these characters be able to have secrets that they can keep from one another. However, it is not always possible to keep these secrets from the other players, due to a variety of reasons. When players act on information in the game that they have as players, but their character does not have, this crosses the line into metagaming. This usually has the effect of irreversibly damaging any plotline related to the antagonism between the characters involved, and has other serious consequences in terms of the game experience of the players involved, particularly the "victim."
Bringing the game into real life. When this type of metagaming rears its ugly head in full force, it is easily the worst of the roleplaying "sins." There are many ways that this type of metagaming can happen. It can be as subtle as being angry after the game at a player whose character caused a setback for yours. It can be as blatant as a player getitng into a fight with another player because of something their character said or did. In its worst form, this type of metagaming ends friendships, breaks up couples, and destroys games. When it comes to this type of metagaming, the verdict is simple: don't do it, ever. Keep what is in the game, in the game, and out of your life. Remember, it's just a game. If you take it personally, then you're not playing the game, the game is playing you.