Scaring Players with the Dreaded WDYD

"What do you do?"

No four words are scarier to a new player. New players seem to think it's a trick question with a correct way to answer. It seems like such an immense question to the fresh meat, that more often than not they'll just respond with: I don't know what to do. Coincidentally there is no response I dislike hearing as a GM more than " I don't know what to do." I think that is mostly because I never feel like the question is that difficult to answer. 

The way to answer may be simple, but the question itself is what confuses most new players. Up until that point, most new players are listening as players, so when the question is posed to them they as players don't know how to respond to it. That is the tricky part though, the question isn't to the player, the question is to the character.

Most new players are trying to think of what they as a player can do. They constrain their thinking to the mechanics of the game. Translating the question to something more elaborate like: "what do you do that the rules say it is okay for you to do?" This is the wrong way to translate the question.

But Mr Our Hero the GM, What DO I do?

The fear of most GM's is that if they don't give the players license to act freely as their characters that they will just be rail-roading the players through the story the GM thought up. Pushing the players from one preplanned encounter to another takes away the fun of table top RPGs. If this is your method of running a game, then you might as well just stop and start writing fiction instead. The appeal of table top RPGs to most people is the ability to make whatever choice they may be inclined to consider. To that end a GM can't answer that question for the player, at least to a certain degree they shouldn't answer that question.

Before you can even begin to answer the broad question of how your character is going to interact with their world in that moment, you should be able to answer a few other questions to help focus your character's in game actions.

Who is your character?

Role playing at it's very basic level is about...playing a role. Yes I know I'm stating the obvious, but if it was really that obvious the WDYD wouldn't scare so many new players. This idea of playing a role cannot be stressed enough to new players. Their reactions to the in-game narrative are not their own reactions. They need to be their character's reactions. You can't react as a character if you don't know who that character is.

This question isn't meant to be yet another WDYD fear inducing type of question. Think of this as a description, list of adjectives, or series of life events that helped shape the character.

Example 1 (Description): Esmeralda Von Higginbottom is a young heiress heading out for adventure in the large world after leaving home.

Example 2 (List of Adjevtives): Smart, irrepressibly helpful, pacifist, scardy cat.

Example 3 (Series of Life Events): Jimmy Bob grew up in the backwater town of Nowheresville. He was the only one from his high school accepted into college. He was studying to become a doctor to some day join up with a program like Doctors Without Borders when the whole world fell apart.

Each example gives some basic information about the character that can help focus the role playing. It isn't a set of can and can'ts for the character. It is insight into the personality that would guide their reactions to the unfolding events around them.

What does your character want?

This is not to be confused with "Who is your character?" from above. This is the drive behind the character's future actions. It should reflect what type of character they are, but to some degree it shows what type of character they hope to become. A character's drive is always part of the in game fiction.

Players can use something specific as a driving force for the character (to obtain the Sword of Swordiness) or more general terms (to become fantastically wealthy). This should be a reference point for the character's actions. Will helping this village make me fantastically wealthy? Would going into the dangerous dungeon without the Sword of Swordiness be something my character would do?

This should help push you as a player in a more specific direction for your reactions. Of course you can change what drives your character. Maybe you've decided that helping the village is worth it even if it can't make you fantastically wealthy. The player is still the ultimate decision maker for the character, so the player should not feel obligated to stick with whatever their original goals were.

How are is your character gonna get what they want?

This is a follow up question to "What does your character want?" This is also another personality question that will help guide the character's reactions and actions within the world. Your character wants to become fantastically wealthy, but how do they aim to do it? Pillage and plunder? Earning it through hard labor? Treasure hunting in dungeons? Stealing it from unsuspecting victims? The way your character wants to achieve their goal is as much a guiding principal as the goal itself.

This is also a question that has an answer subject to change based on the game. A character that steals from unsuspecting victims may have second thoughts about it when they see the consequences of stealing from a particular victim. Hard labor may be nice and steady to make money, but it would take forever to actually get it done. It is entirely reasonable for a player to come up with answers to these questions at the start of a session and have entirely different answers to the questions at the end of the session.

No really Mr Our Hero the GM, what do I do?

I don't know, you tell me.