VR Roleplay Design and Traditions
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Beryl slumps to the floor, on her knees. Her hands ball up into fists and she starts to cry. She is alone in a small stone house. There are no other participants nearby. I am the only witness. I am invisible and silent. She does not know I am there.
Beryl is played by Rydog, and she is on her hands and knees, crying alone in her room. Crying into a Virtual Reality (VR) headset.
As Beryl she has just witnessed the death of her husband in a nightmare, acted out in a dreamlike landscape by the participant who plays as her husband. My role as the Game Manager (GM) is to use the tools we have in VR to teleport her from this dreamlike landscape to the floor next to her bed. To make it seem as if she has awoken from the nightmare.
I watch the scene play out, and my focus is on whatever missing context there might be. We can only feel so much in VR. It is my task to fill the void between what the player is experiencing and what is represented virtually. I decide that I cannot add to this in any meaningful way, and any interruption would take from the scene, disrupt the purity of the roleplay, and trample player agency. My actions should be additive to the scene. It is obvious to me that she is fully her character at this moment. I say nothing and act only as an invisible audience.
She stumbles out the door of her house. An icon appears in the bottom of my vision, alerting me that other participants have a query. Using my GM tools, I teleport to them. They want to know if the clothes they were attempting to dry are still wet. This is not something the virtual world can tell them, and it is my role as GM to establish a common truth for the characters. For the next five hours, I will move from participant to participant, answering queries, delivering prompts and organizing story events for a cast of 40 participants. The role of GM is also the role of designer in Virtual Reality Roleplay (VR RP). As GMs we plan regular sessions, we set up and organise participants, and during live sessions we move between scenes touching the roleplay directly.
This article is an exploration of the traditions of VR RP design from the perspective of the GM through the lens of player agency. The practice of GMing is the process of design during a live session, through the use of prompts, queries and direction of support characters.
Player agency – a lens for design
Player agency in the VR RP tradition is more than the ability to influence the outcomes of plot. It is the space in which a player has sovereignty over their own roleplay. In traditional VR RP terms, this is the idea that players own their character, and that a GM should have very little input on how that character is played or depicted. Player agency is a boundary between player and GM that informs decisions on all levels of design; rules regarding avatars (costumes), playstyles, alibi, gameplay system mechanics, support character direction, direct GM prompts, the layout and functionality of virtual worlds, and more.
As the community matured rapidly in 2020 this concept gained importance due to the rise of live streamed roleplay in VR. Players started earning a living streaming the point-of-view of their characters, and so ownership over those characters became guarded. In some cases, as players were spending long periods of time inhabiting their characters in repeated weekly sessions, they became closer to their characters than the GMs who set out the initial conditions of a character. In a space where a GM can quite literally become a voice in the head of a player during live roleplay, how much a GM could influence a character became a debate.
The dilemma is how can a designer create an experience for a player without the ability to influence the design of their character. We have developed norms for play that define what is acceptable for a designer to influence, and what parts of roleplay belong to the player. GMs are expected to never deliver emotions or thoughts directly to a player. It is considered unacceptable to tell a player how their character feels or thinks. A skilled GM will offer, as a prompt, a piece of context laden with emotional meaning that a player may accept based on their understanding of the character. This is played out within the mind of their character, under the agency of the player.
As a way to negotiate between the agency of a player and the designs of a GM, character sheets have been taken from tabletop traditions. These are used as a means to form a contract of play between GM and player. Tabletop game systems and videogame gameplay mechanics have been adapted for use within roleplay to confine, constrain, or guide the kind of roleplay that can be done. The difficulty for designers has been to ensure that any systems are additive to the flow of roleplay and do not impede upon the boundary of a player’s agency over their character.
Touch, taste, temperature, scent – GM practice
The main responsibility that a GM in VR RP has, is to be active and present during live sessions. GMs move invisibly between scenes and players, answering queries, delivering prompts, or directing Support Characters. GMs will work with support character participants, directing them to engage in some story driven event for the player characters. It’s common for roleplay projects to use virtual tools that allow players to “summon a GM” to their location to ask a question. This is known as answering a ping or a query. GMs have special means of moving between players, either by directly teleporting to them or by using “noclip” which allows movement through objects and flight while in VR. When not being called on, the GM can deliver prompts to player characters engaged in scenes. This is a kind of narration that bears some resemblance to scene setting in tabletop traditions.
When delivering a prompt or answering a ping, GMs have the ability to break roleplay, to bring players out of character just by saying something. Usually a GM is just a disembodied voice. The goal is to be low impact and to flow with a scene to minimize disruption. Every interjection by a GM into a scene must be additive not subtractive.
The aim is to fill the void of context between what a player character is doing or experiencing and what is represented in VR. The GM must fill this void with context. In VR we lack some basic senses and the GM can give context to those senses. Temperature, touch, and smell are all unrepresented. Sometimes a Player Character can infer each of these from visual or audio cues. Usually however, the GM must add to the reality of a scene. As a GM you establish the temperature, you describe the feeling of a thing physically and you influence the characters with the scent of a place or a thing.
Given that we must take care to not infringe upon the agency of a player, we should look to present the missing context in a way that does not directly carry with it the thoughts of how a character experiences the world. How a GM offers information matters; it can set a mood or indicate some narrative intent to the player. Here GMing becomes a task of poetry and staging to convey images, senses, and indirect emotional imagery via prompt or query response. Since we are invisible, our voice becomes the tool of action. Where we speak from, the tone, the volume – all these are parameters we have control over.
Every time a GM speaks to a character during roleplay, we incur a level of risk that we may end up being subtractive to a scene. For example, when being summoned via a ping, choosing where to position yourself and when exactly to speak to a player is part of trying to remain low impact. If I interrupt a player mid-sentence and speak to them from behind, they will turn, and be broken out of character. Knowing when not to speak is one of the most essential skills of a GM. Knowing where to speak from is just as valuable.
In a purist sense, roleplay must never be interrupted, and a scene should always exist as the most pure version of reality. Disruption is to be avoided at all costs. However the community has found that a lack of context creates more confusion. If enough context is lacking the scene becomes a bland murkiness that creates a mental burden to track. If there is unclear context, a GM can set the reality of the situation for all participants to aid in the flow of roleplay. Thus prompts and responses to queries not only have to carry the emotional moment of a scene, they must fit effortlessly into the reality of a scene, so that no player is taken out of their character.
When not delivering prompts or answering queries, observation is important. It’s the GMs responsibility to be the invisible audience for the player. Besides it being a privilege to get to witness the performance of art between roleplayers firsthand, there is a more pragmatic purpose to being this invisible audience. In order to best deliver plot or prompts we must know the characters of the players as if they are our own. How else can a GM know how a participant may react to the interjection of a prompt, if not by observing the roleplay and building a rapport through repeated interactions? We can make educated guesses about how well a prompt may land, or which kind of prompt will best aid the roleplay of that player, only if we have spent time seeing them play out the lives of their characters. We must respect the agency of a player to deeply define their character, and we then facilitate them through prompts and queries.
Here of course is the implicit argument that a GM is a dedicated role that is to be carried out during the full time of a live session. This is not a norm within the community, but has become an emerging debate surrounding what it means to practice good GMing. Within some projects the lead organisers of the project will be both GM and player. This results in a kind of myopia from GMs who see the reality of the roleplay world through the eyes of their character.
We cannot ever be perfectly objective when it comes to where our focus is, but having characters as a GM creates a natural conflict of interest. The less time spent as a GM also further harms the experience of players as a GM will essentially build up a knowledge gap between what is merely pre-planned and what is actually happening and being experienced in session. “Part-time” GMing leads to worse outcomes for players, even when the best intentions of objectivity are kept in mind. In very poor cases, GMs will create scenarios that they themselves will be a participant in.
GMs who participate as players will lack the knowledge necessary for delivering subtle and impactful prompts. In order to serve the needs of a scenario or plot, prompts will be coarsely used to affect a story outcome, instead of being focused on the emotional impact it has to the other characters. Plot outcomes might still be varied with simple narrative levers, but the influence a player has over the outcome of a plot point is less important than the influence they have over the inner thoughts and emotions of how their character should feel about that outcome.
By not nurturing and enabling a rich ground for players to explore the emotional depth of their character, GMs essentially rob them of their roleplay experience. GMs should aim to facilitate and be a tool to aid the roleplay of a player – not to direct their roleplay into narrow arborescent paths of narrative plot.
The third pillar of VR roleplay – supporting characters
Support Characters within VR RP are part of the main organization of how live sessions operate. It is exceptionally rare within the VR RP community for monsters or NPCs to be computer controlled. GMs will organise a team of Support Characters and give prepared roles to act out. This happens in much the same way as in other roleplaying traditions, however the ability for a GM to micromanage a support character is much greater. A GM can shadow a support character and speak directly only to them over a private voice channel, allowing for a high degree of micromanagement.
It is often imagined that Support Characters have no agency within roleplay. That they exist merely as tools for a GM to use as levers for the scenario. This traditional imagining of the role leads to poor roleplay outcomes. GMs should allow for players to “touch” a support character, even if that means the support character will not fulfill their narrative objective. This may be an emotional impact that a player has on the support character to act in a way counter to the direction of the GM. Forcing an emotional response that disregards the influence of the player, for the sake of some story objective, tramples the agency of that player.
In order to preserve the truth of a scene, some agency must be given over to the support character, and there must be some trust that they as a roleplayer can react with emotional honesty to the actions of player characters. As GMs we are more detached from the reality of a scene than those within the magic circle. Support Characters are closer to the truth of the roleplay. This is the agency owed by the GM to the support character, in order to create a more real experience. We usually imagine this as respecting the purity of the roleplay – that what happens inside the magic circle is a kind of sacrosanct truth that can only be “retconned” in the most exceptional of cases.
Without Support Characters, very little of a world can be made to react or come alive by a GM. It’s strange then, that such a crucial role within the community is so undervalued. Many different terms exist for this same role. Sometimes referred to as extras, non-player characters (NPCs), assistant player characters (APCs), and more. It has become fashionable for projects to come up with new terms for this role as a way of continuing to attract participants, or to signal some faux improvement in the treatment of those relegated to this underclass. In VR RP there are no meaningful differences between “NPC” and “Support Character”.
The community maintains a caste system whereby those better connected socially, or those who have some success and popularity as a live streamer can more easily participate as player characters. They enjoy the privileges of player agency. There persists a myth of “earning” or “working your way up” from Support Character to player character. This myth drives much of the participation of those who are Support Characters, despite the common mistreatment and exploitation of people’s time and energy.
Some projects have, in order to retain participants or out of a sense of fairness, allowed Support Character participants to create semi-permanent characters to play during roleplay in minor roles. This lets designers fill out the virtual world with background characters, and creates a way for Support Characters to roleplay when not needed for specific story events. Participants in these roles often find themselves in a grey area between full player character and Support Character. They will often be treated by some player character participants as fully realised characters, but be ignored by the GMs and other players as background. This dissonance can create a kind of disruption in the roleplay as participants can easily sense when some characters are not being treated as real people by the scenario. In worse cases players become unhappy that a character they would otherwise wish to speak to or have a scene with, is whisked away to become a monster at the whim of a GM who is out of touch with the needs of their participants.
There have been slow changes that challenge this tradition, where the focus of a project shifts from the needs of all player characters, to the needs of all participants. Some projects have changed their structure such that the role of Support Character becomes shared among all participants, erasing the boundary between player and non-player. The shift from viewing only those who are player characters to seeing all who participate as being deserving of the attention of the designers has become a litmus test for good design within the community.
Excuses about time, GM availability, or skill have been raised as part of a pushback against this equitable treatment. In some cases the unfair treatment is seen as desirable, as participants should “earn” their status as player characters. In other cases the issue of trust is raised as a spectre of concern. Roleplay projects whose priority is on a live streaming audience, will ensure that any support character role of importance is played by a GM, as the quality of the live stream is paramount to all other concerns.
Designing for player agency
In order to mature to the point where development and design of new VR RP projects can be codified and built upon, design theory needs to also mature past simply repeating the traditions of the community. Many new projects will thoughtlessly copy or reproduce the same kind of design traditions and result in the same poor design. Player agency can be used as a guide to find the best outcomes for roleplay. If a project elevates all participants as being worthy of equal consideration, then the benefit manifests in more real worlds, and more satisfying outcomes for players.
For GMs this essentially means that designing for player agency raises the quality of roleplay. It is giving agency not just to the participant themselves, but to the result of the truthful emotional reactions in scenes. Actions only have real consequences if a player feels those consequences in the mind of their character. For a choice to matter, it must matter on an inner emotional level, not just as a branching path of plot. This can only come from the player themselves, and we as GMs should facilitate that.
Player agency as a design lens within the VR RP community can provide a foundation for improvements in how we structure and run projects. It can act as a guide for how to act in session as a GM.
For the player Rydog coming out of her nightmare as Beryl, crying on the floor, my role as GM was not to tell them they were in distress. If I did, it would be more than simply not giving them a choice, but stealing the actual roleplay of their scene. They themselves are the agent of what their character felt and lived within that moment. The choice to observe and not “touch” the scene as it played out gives it greater meaning. We as GMs should be there, as the invisible audience, to experience the emotion of the character so that when the time comes for a prompt or a query, we can engage at the same emotional place as the player, and deliver a more honest and truthful reality.
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Green, S. 2026. ‘Crying Alone for the Invisible Audience.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
