These days new players usually get lost or misguided or mostly end up without any idea for what's expected from them in terms of playing a role and it's an unfortunate omission for a game like Space Station 13 that calls itself a Role-Playing Game. Much like how the Nile is the lifeblood of hundreds of millions of Africans, roleplay is the lifeblood of this game's culture and is the source of why people can spend literal thousands of hours on this decades-old game with 2D graphics that look no better than an SNES game in most cases, as it doesn't require flashy code changes or cool additions, but merely people who know how to entertain collaboratively rather than passively be entertained by rote gameplay mechanics alone. This space station of ours is not just a free-form Among Us and playing it as such would be a quiet disservice to everyone, including you.
Of course an article like this is just recommendations for the foundation that a beginner will practice before moving on to other roles. Once you are an experienced player who has your head steady on your shoulders and you don't need these tips, you'll find yourself sometimes playing in spite of them. The first thing to know about roleplaying is that it's as difficult as you make it for yourself. Nobody is obligating you to make a dozen-page character diary.
Roleplaying is just taking the setting seriously. Just behave according to the spirit of the game. It's as simple as that. You're experiencing yet another day in the life of the worst space station ever, and although the scenery and tone conveys that, it's only half the recipe. It is YOU, the player, who bears no less responsibility.
You're creating a story for yourself, much like an actor in a movie or a television show. In a typical video game a character's personality and backstory would be predetermined by a writer, but here it is YOU who has the autonomy to choose the look, personality, and history of your character! Want to play a ruthless hard-boiled Detective or a slap-happy Clown? Perhaps a perennially bitchy Doctor with vulnerabilities on the inside or an overly humble and meek Janitor with an far more interesting past? That decision is up to you, as there are no plot decisions or quest lines ordering your character around.
All of us possess the necessary charisma for roleplaying (albeit to a lesser degree than professionals). The trick is to recognize this deep charisma and bring it to the surface appropriately by practicing a few key behaviors:
There are essentially two parts of roleplaying: when you're playing as a character and when you're playing as a player. This is reflected in all the roleplay rules and clauses, but can be boiled down to a simple one: In-character and Out-of-character do not mix. This is the basis of pretty much every roleplaying community and in the case of here it's server rule 4.
Example: As a player you might want to optimize a "build" to build a repertoire of strengths and abilities, but if you go around asking other characters they would have their own biases and preferences. You as a player know the most effective is stealth archer, but if you asked a Mages Guild or a Fighters Guild where to spend your training money, what do you think they would say?
Once you're here for long enough, your character would learn what patterns to expect from your fellow spacemen by past shifts with them.
Example: if the security forces asks you about suspicious people, feel free to name the grey jumpsuit-wearers who commit crimes too often, or the characters of players you know play antagonist too much - the redshirts would likely agree with you.
While it's loathsome to bring up the OOC aspect of playing a character for a long time in this game, it's a reality and will hamper how seriously people take your character if you constantly make these egregious errors or annoying behaviors.
This metagame knowledge will also help your character development when you need to make the hard decisions. With someone who isn't a real character, isn't interested in the social part of the game, and who probably only cares for combat or romance, you can end them with a clear conscience when they stand between you and your goal, or if the situation demands it, and laugh at their complaints. And vice versa: it’s better to spare a good roleplayer by replacing the murder with captivity, court, or non-fatal blows, or even give in and let them escape. As a last resort, give them a beautiful death!
The common stereotype of roleplaying is that conflict is something avoided at all costs - but that's not reality. The trick is when conflicts are escalated, they can be the classic devastation that any spaceman is familiar with.
Server Rule #3 makes a point that in-character issues and fights escalating to murder is a part of this game: which means it's your duty as a roleplayer to resolve these issues in an interesting way. Conflicts take many forms, whether it be a theological argument with the Chaplain, denial of service, from open suspicion to envy of another character's possessions. Character conflicts are a way of life here, because violence is not necessarily a part of it.
You should not rush to resolve the situation - the longer the escalation takes, the more pleasure both parties will receive, with the ultimate knowledge that you don't have to kill everyone you're fighting with. A drunken fist fight in the bar that results in brawlers reconciling and getting drunk together - a classic example that will be impossible if you escalate it into a knife fight.
Example: a migrant trader arrived to the station. The Quartermaster feels the threat to their indispensability (and therefore - well-being and life). First, they will hint or send a threat, demanding the merchant to pay a share and obey. Then, if the merchant does not want to bend, let the brownshorts beat him, take away their products. This gives enough options for the development of the plot - the trader may turn to security, conceive a cunning revenge, or escape from the station to find powerful allies. Or maybe they will soften the Quartermaster and become their best supplier!
In any case, it will be more fun than immediately deporting the trader from the airlock or simply ignoring their existence.
The round will come out boring - and you'll be the main reason of it if:
Most of the game revolves around the action of the antagonists against the station. Even if you know who the traitors are, if you're a good roleplayer then you'd know it's important to establish a mood for the round.
Hence, if you discover an antagonist, you might not want to rush to end them, but play with them! Even if you're a redshirted perfectionist and legalist and the triumph of justice over evil is important to you, arrange an investigation. Put sticks in the wheels of the antagonists, watch them, catch them and then arrange a case to your Captain with the ironclad evidence you gathered. Then you have killed them in the most beautiful way possible: your way, rather than simply shooting them dead as they would have done to you.
By roleplaying you may have a better chance of losing, but does success alone really bring joy to this game? Remember the rounds where nothing happens for an hour, because the players professionally killed all the antagonists within 15 minutes. Remember and remind yourself: the only victory for an antagonist is a great defeat.
Because of this, directness is also boring.
Example: "Clown is a vampire!"
and
"Head of security, let's step aside, away from the halls... I want to share my suspicions about the clown Boppo. He behaves very strange lately, don’t you think?"
Of course, this goes both ways - not every antagonist will be creative or entertaining for your character to bounce off of. Wizards who do nothing but teleport around and poke people with a stick, traitors who only steal important stuff and then sit on them until the shuttle home, or a ninja silently beheading a few people because they dared to look at them. Cults in particular can turn into a useless chaos by throwing their monster-spawns through the halls.
It's really up to both you and them to make the conflicts exciting, challenging, and inclusive.
It's the quality and integrity of roleplaying, not its freedom, that is relevant. You can tell good roleplaying because you feel it: when some rando or assistant whose name you recognize gets busted, deep down your first thought is that they're a shitter and you discard that information for the rest of your life. But if it's a character you know for being peaceful, the heart-of-gold doctor, the pollyannish always-kind femstatic, then you’re not so sure... it makes you question your assumption of them and you want to find out more. Are the redshirts being shitcurity? Did they just get too caught up in the moment? Were we wrong in our assessment of their character?
For all this game's staying power, many characters relegate themselves to behaving within the boundaries of a broadly defined archetype they've created: a one-note detective that is cranky and aloof, the assistants are feisty, and so on. But it's those times like the doctor or the femstatic that something pushes you to think about a character's inner life rather than their exterior actions that makes it start feeling more like a literary fiction rather than an adventure-of-the-week television. And it will ultimately feel magical the first time an antagonist acknowledges the Exploitables you wrote.
But the best thing to remember is that roleplay is actually the easiest part of this game. If you roleplay bad, at least the only person who's looking stupid is you. Not so if you mess up the Supermatter!
When you coat everything in a veneer of silliness and keep 50 feet of ironic distance from your own character, when you constantly roll your eyes and laugh at yourself like some kind of Marvel movie, the moments of genuine pathos end up falling completely flat, but it's those moments that make roleplaying really magical.