No, You are Not a Flirtatious Tree...

Hmm... good point. Though these were specifically close friends who were kind enough to give my 'Dungeons and Dragons' a try. I was wondering if there was some way to give them incentive, to at least try to destroy the video game mentality. But I do agree, and I will be trying to find another group (but keep this one going, just because they're close friends). This one is just to try to convince a group of friends to 'roleplay' and not to kill everything in the room. Thanks for the information!...

There is some sound wisdom here. Its hard for new RPG gamers to take roleplaying seriously. Unless they are theater or drama nerds already, they're likely to feel a bit self-conscious about serious roleplaying. As DMs, most of us are natural storytellers, and part of why we DM is tell a story, but players, especially those new to roleplaying, aren't always on board with our stories.

My advice: let go of your serious RP story for now. Keep it in your back pocket, and keep your world intact. But for these newish players, write something a bit more tongue in cheek. Engage their silliness, embrace the absurdity. Add a food mage as a main bad guy. You can even keep your serious story line going on behind the scenes; just allow the daily details of the campaign to be as silly as they need to be.

In other words: just go with the flow. It sounds like these are good friends, and that you really want to have them as a D&D group. Remember that D&D has to be collaborative. It can't just be what the DM wants and it can't just be what the PCs want. In order for the game to be fun, everyone has to be having fun.

I have written a story for my campaign that could easily be played as an epic fantasy. I created all the characters for my guys (another good tip for new DMs: if you're pulling in people new to roleplaying, create some characters for them; many are daunted, annoyed, or just uninterested in the character creation process at first). Our party has: A Cleric of Light from an ancient High Elf order on a quest to retrieve lost artifacts, a Tiefling Sorcerer (wild mage) who woke at the age of 10 in a field and has no memory of his past before then, a Dwarven Palandin who is a member of the dwarven royal line and is searching for the lost dwarven homeland, an exiled Dragonborn warrior, and a desert elf Assassin on the run from his own thieves guild. There are serious, world altering events that they are embroiled in, a mysterious "agent" who gave them their first job, and a possibly corrupt order of Clerics that sent them on a morally dubious quest.

As you can see, we have the workings of a Brandon Sanderson novel here. Instead, to misquote Joatmoniac, I get Monty Python every Monday we play. There is snarky commentary on the dorky fantasy names I come up with. The paladin keeps trying to detect evil on creatures, finding that they are not evil, then getting attacked by them (amidst cries of "Detect F*%^ing Evil!!"). Elementals are not evil...but they'll kill ya The party seemed to have the most fun when I had them run across a a Fae revel where they were able to drink wine, eat skewered squirrel, and copulate with Dryads...so yeah, not too epic...However, just one week later the player with the Cleric had a serious moral crisis when a good creature stood in the way of his goal. The player seemed to be really stressed; his instinct was to kill this creature and get it out of the way, but he's been playing this character long enough now that he said, "Oh man, I can't strike the first blow...I just can't!"

The RP will come, but let the fun come first. The fun will keep them coming back. You may find that, after weeks or months or years of fun, silly RP, your players, when faced with a serious challenge or dilemma, will begin to take things more seriously.

You can try to have them describe what they are seeing in their heads. I have a friend in my game that HATES to role play. He loves the mechanics and the challenge and being with friends and a good story, but getting him to be his character is like pulling teeth. I've found that even having him describe what his powers look like when he casts them, or describe what he moves are in combat besides mechanically has given him the beginnings of getting into the role playing.

It's important to temper your expectations too. When I first started this most recent game, I came in as a DM with both guns blazing thinking that if I was putting in this effort, my friends would too. Instead they simply told me to take a Xanax and calm down.