I dislike the separation of "role play" and "combat" but, in many RPG's, it's not a terribly unfair distinction. A lot of RPG's treat combat in the same way that say, Final Fantasy, does. You are playing, playing, playing, then the music starts, you cut to the battle scene map and all decisions become about tactics and strategy instead of exploring or being a particular persona. The combat is largely removed from playing a particular personality or group of personalities.
First, an apology: it's Friday afternoon, I'm a bit bored, there's nothing that
has to be done before Monday, hence a lengthy reply!
So there's the vexed question of "what's roleplaying"? From what you've said here, I don't think we're too far apart on that - for example, in what I've quoted you
don't seem to be equating "roleplaying" with funny voices and an excessive attention to the colour of the plumage in my PC's hat!
To try and make my view of what roleplaying is a bit clearer, I'm going to refer to
a blog post that LostSoul drew my attention to, and that I see something new and worthwhile in nearly every time I look over it (thanks, [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]!):
One type of player role is when the game requires a player to be an advocate for a single player character . . . When a player is an advocate for a character in a roleplaying game, this means that his task in playing the game is to express his character’s personality, interests and agenda for the benefit of himself and other players. This means that the player tells the others what his character does, thinks and feels, and he’s doing his job well if the picture he paints of the character is clear and powerful, easy to relate to.
I'm sure that this doesn't exhaust what "roleplaying" might mean for a player in an RPG, but I think it captures a good chunk of what is going on in a lot of games, both mainstream and more avant garde.
So if, in a combat,
all decisions become about tactics and strategy instead of exploring or being a particular persona [and t]he combat is largely removed from playing a particular personality or group of personalities, then indeed roleplaying in this sense has dropped away. Instead of advocating for their PCs, the players have become some sort of hive-mind, in which a given player's PC just happens to be the game pieces over which that player has pre-eminent control.
Now in a certain sort of game (eg Tunnels & Trolls or D&D played in their most simplistic mode) then a certain degree of advocacy might remain in such a situation - because the player will want to keep his/her PC alive (otherwise s/he has to drop out of the game, at least temporarily) and PCs in simplistic T&T and D&D don't really have personalities beyoned the desires to live, to kill and to loot. So staying alive by killing the monsters
is advocating for the first two of these elements of the PC. (The problems in actual play caused by the third of these - the desire to loot - are illustrated by the need, in Gygax's PHB, for an explicit set of guidelines on handling treasure distribution among surviving PCs.)
But once PCs have more complex personalities and backstories than this - which they do in nearly every modern RPG, I think - then the issue you identify - of "bingo" combat displacing roleplaying - lurks as a threat to the game. (In saying it's a threat, I'm assuming that the players want to play an RPG. If they really want a tactical skirmish game linked by improv drama - to borrow some evocative phrasing from Justin Alexander - then there is no problem.)
In my experience (for what it's worth - I'm just one guy GMing a handful of players), keeping character advocacy alive in combat, once PCs become more complex, is achieved by making the stakes of combat overwhelmingly salient to the interests of the PCs in question,
and in such a fashion that they are overwhelmingly salient to the players as well. So the players, in pursuing what is salient to them, will find themselves advocating for their PCs. (The problem with "bingo" combat is that pursuit of the goal of winning the combat - which is overwhelmingly salient to the players - doesn't bring into play anything that is salient to the interests of the PCs other than those basic T&T/D&D instincts of living and killing.)
This is achieved in a few ways. First, the players have to actually be
interested in playing their PCs. This is more tricky than it sounds, because it's not unheard of for a player to conceive of an interesting PC on paper, but have no interest in actually playing that PC at the table. (I have had such players in my group - in practice, they tend to have little impact on the group or the game, sitting around doing little until the dice start rolling, at which point they make the relevant tactical contributions before sitting back again to watch others actually play the game.)
In addition to these players, though, are those who
want to play their PC but have been burned by past experiences - of GMs punishing them for it (eg paladins being stripped of their paladinhood) or stomping on it (eg GMs railroading over the top of PC-initiated "sidequests" - I use inverted commas because I feel the very notion of a sidequest makes sense only in the context of a GM-dominated railroad).
To encourage these players to actually play their PCs, the GM needs to set up situations, and then follow them through, in a way that actually illustrates to these players, and assure them, that playing their PCs won't cost them (in XP, in kudos, in respect at the table, in interesting things to do) but will reward them.
And combat can be a part of this as much as anything. Drop so-called "filler" combats. Make every combat encounter speak to one or more of the PCs directly. And then set it up so that
the players have a reason to play out their PCs' interests and concerns. Some simple examples from my 4e game:
*The imp, who previously had tried to negotiate with the chaos sorcerer but had been driven off by other members of the party, turns up again. Who does he attack first? The chaos sorcerer, with a taunt along the lines of "So, have you mastered the chaos yet?" The player now has a good reason, within the context of this combat, to advocate for his PC, and to engage the imp back.
*An NPC mage is defeated by the party, and indentured into servitude by the PC paladin of the Raven Queen, as penance for her wrongdoing. In a couple of encounters she doesn't pull her weight. In the next encounter, then - a hard one with lots of undead - the paladin pushes her into the front lines to encourage her to get involved. She does, but gets killed. And immediately stands up again, as a wight, and attacks the paladin. Who defeats her. A few sessions later, she turns up again. As a mad wraith, summoned by a goblin hexer who wanted to place a curse on the paladin. And attacks the paladin again. A paladin of the Raven Queen already has his/her interests and aspirations at stake in an encounter with undead. But the sequence of encounters described above made it even easier for the player of the paladin to advocate for his PC in a detailed and really engaged way, while still resolving the combat. (For anyone who cares, the decision to have the NPC come back as a wight was made by me on the spot - it seemed right at the time, and payed dividends.)
*The PC mage, whose home city was destroyed by marauding orcs and goblins, is in a tent village of refugees from goblin violence. Hobgoblins attack. They kill adults and start carrying off children (as the players and PCs know, this is so the children can be brainwashed into a mad battle cult). The mage charges across the battlefield with Expeditious Retreat, and uses Colour Spray to knock out the hobgoblins (they're minions). He chooses not to kill, because he doesn't want to hurt the children (and Colour Spray is an "all creatures" effect). While the other PCs keep going over a rise, chasing a couple of hobgoblins who were either outside the area of the Colour Spray, or were non-minion leaders, the mage stops, picks up a sword dropped by one of the unconscious hobgoblins, and starts slitting their throats. Most of the refugees cheer. Some are shocked. As are the other players (and their PCs, when they come back over the rise and see what the wizard has done). This episode is possible because of 4e's minion rules and non-lethal damage rules and "say yes" rules (which mean that no rolls are required to kill the unconscious hobgoblins). It would be a lot harder to pull off - either as GM or as player - in some other systems.
As best I can interpret these examples is that, in each case, their is an alignment between the PC build and backstory, the thematic/story concern of the
player in putting together that PC, the build of the encounter by me as GM, and the way players and GM together resolve the encounter. On my part, at least, it's not accidental - I'm deliberately building encounters that will pick up on the hooks built into the PCs, and in the course of resolution I'm deliberately making choices that will engage the
players and let them advocate for their PCs as part of resolving the combat.
I think 4e works well for this because (at least in my experience) it is pretty forgiving of a wide range of tactical choices made in the course of play. (I know that some others think that tactically highly optimised play is essential for PC survival, but I haven't seen that.) Also - and this is a point that [MENTION=6676736]Pentius[/MENTION] and [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] have both made recently in other threas - in 4e if you build a character that expresses your thematic concerns as a player, you can be reasonably confident that if you play that character in a way that expresses those concerns (ie you advocate for your PC) this won't lead to any sacrifice of tactical "oomph".
So what we have coming together here is some system stuff: (i) features of 4e's PC build rules; (ii) features of its action resolution rules; (iii) its monster design and the default story that those monsters bring with them. And some participant stuff: (iv) the GM adopting a situation+character narrativist approach to encounter design; (v) players who want to roleplay by advocating for their PCs; (vi) both GM and players following through on this in actual encounter resolution. And because of the system stuff, the participants don't have to drift, or push against, the system to play in this way. If anything, I feel you might have to push against some aspects of the system to play a different way.
How does TROS or Burning Wheel facilitate role play during combat? And how do those games differ from D&D?
Good question.
In terms of the picture I've tried to paint above, they give the
players an extra reason to treat as salient to
them thematically relevant matters that are salient to the
PCs given their personalities. In TRoS this is achieved via the mechanic of Spiritual Attributes - bonus dice that come into play when a PC is engaged in a fight that is important to him/her in story/thematic/emotional terms. In BW, hero/fate points are earned when a PC pursues or confronts things that are important to him/her in story/thematic/emotional terms. So again, there is a mechanical incentive for players to treat as salient, in resolving a combat, what is salient to his/her PCs.
That said, at the moment I'm reading the Adventure Burner for BW. And it's interesting how much good advice there is in there, which is relevant to how I want to run my game even though I don't have these extra mechanical bells and whistles that BW has. Some parts of the advice - like on how to treat setting (start loose, build in play so that the setting becomes one way in which the campaign story, and the struggle of the PCs, is expressed), and designing scenarios and encounters so that they speak to the concerns of the PCs (ie the players hook the GM, not vice versa) - I'm already doing. But there is good stuff on skill checks that I think can help me in 4e, and on Let It Ride, and other things too.
So while the mechanical bells and whistles can help, I don't know that they're essential. The players have to be wanting to play this way. Ron Edwards notes this in
his review of TRoS:
One concern that faces such a game is in hooking the wrong fish - that is, if a person is drawn to the game due to its realistic, gritty, gut-ripping combat as a first priority, then they may discover that in application, some "other thing" is going on. Jake Norwood is quite blunt about this and considers it a feature rather than a bug. Basically, he has no sympathy: such a person adapts to the thematic goals of play or stops playing, because his character keeps getting maimed. (I kinda like this attitude, as it matches my own regarding people who are flummoxed by certain features of Sorcerer.) Another functional solution, of course, is Simulationist Drift, and some evidence on the forums suggests that a certain subset of TROS fans have already headed in that direction.
Mechanics can't make people play narrativist if they don't want to. Those players will just see them as bad mechanics.
Equally important as the players' approach, in my view, and more imporant than the mechanical bells and whistles of a game like TRoS or BW, is the GMing approach - to encounter design, to encounter resolution, to player involvement in world creation and PC backstories. And to be blunt, I think that D&D has traditionally encouraged bad GMing practices here - too much GM force (whether via alignment, or fudging rolls in the interests of "story", or treating the GM's so-called "storyline" as primary and player interests as "sidequests", or whatever), not enough about building scenarios and encounters that speak to the players via their PCs.
On the other hand, my view that these are bad practices may be a minority one. After all, there was a very hostile response on these boards to those parts of the 4e DMG and DMG2 that suggest alternative practices. And a lot of people seem to think that it's cool to have adventures where only the GM knows, or has any prospect of knowing, the backstory. And that it's the players' duty to follow the GM's plot hooks, however crappy they might be, or irrelevant to the story the players' PCs signal the players are interested in.
Here's something from
Vincent Baker:
A game where the meaning happens mostly pre-play is one in which somebody or everybody has something to say and already knows what it is when the game starts. You can always tell these games: the GM expects his or her villains and their schemes to be absolutely gripping, but they aren't; the players keep wanting to play their characters as well as the characters deserve, but it's not happening. I make my character a former slave but when it comes up in play it's because I force it to, and my fellow players dodge eye contact and the GM wants to get on with the plot.
I think that D&D - in its (pre-4e) advice to GMs, in its approach to published campaign worlds (especially pre-4e), in its approach to adventure design (and this continues through 4e) - tends to encourage this sort of GM-centred play. And
this, in my opinion, is one main reason why many D&D players feel that combat is at odds with roleplaying. Because at least when the roleplaying stops, and (given D&D's general lack of non-combat mechanics) we get back to informal social negotiation for the framing and resolution of scenes, the players have a chance to add a bit of colour! Which, in this sort of play, is sometimes about as close to roleplaying as you can get.
EDIT - TL;DR: read Pentius's post above this one. Agreed 100%.
