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Legends & Lore: Roleplaying in D&D Next

Legends & Lore
Roleplaying in D&D Next

By Mike Mearls

D&D started out as a roleplaying game, and D&D Next plans to embrace the concept of roleplaying your character. How? Mike shares some of the current thoughts of the D&D Next team on the topic of roleplaying your character.

What are your thoughts?

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I like Inspiration a lot as a roplaying reward. It reminds me of Monte Cook's Praemal campaign's Heroe Point that Chris Perkins discuss in Dungeon magazine 75's Editorial. It encourage engagement and participation which can only help and benefit campaigns.

Inspiration is something many DMs already do when they award advantage or other benefit because of a clever idea or roleplay. Where normally the reward was spontaneous on the instant, Inspiration will allow it to be used in a short moment later rather than immediatly.
 
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In general, I like it (especially the tables!). However, I'd rather Inspiration last longer, and I'd rather it not be able to spend it on other people. "Use your Inspiration on me, please, I really need it!" / "I'd rather save it in case I need it!" can make for bad feelings even amongst mostly rational players. Otherwise, looks pretty good, to me.
 

In general, I like it (especially the tables!). However, I'd rather Inspiration last longer, and I'd rather it not be able to spend it on other people. "Use your Inspiration on me, please, I really need it!" / "I'd rather save it in case I need it!" can make for bad feelings even amongst mostly rational players. Otherwise, looks pretty good, to me.

I think it sounds great. If you have an accomplished role-player in the group that gets these kinds of rewards often - he gets to share it. Everybody in the group benefits from playing ball with the role-players. Also, you can't hoard it. Hoard something else if you must hoard.
 

When you have your character do something that reflects your character's personality, goals, or beliefs, the DM can reward you with inspiration. The key lies in describing your action in an interesting way, acting out your character's dialogue, or otherwise helping to bring the game to life by adding some panache to your play.
The way he describes it, it sounds like you'd be giving inspiration to players who talk in a silly voice, which would just penalize people who don't. Fate points only really make sense to me as a reward for when you do something you wouldn't normally do (and then using them in a later scene--I don't understand how getting a bonus in the same scene would help).
 
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It's bennies. Cool. I like the help with tying background to the setting. I'm sure there are some people who are purple in the face that DnD would DARE dictate how they role play their character with their bad mechanics, but really, its a good idea that most DMs do anyway. And I agree with Mearls: I remember my characters not because of the 15th HD parademon they beat, but because they did that because they'd accidentally summoned it in a sad attempt to undo a previous mistake.
 

I quite liked this article.

The tables are simply lists of suggestions for character non-mechanical traits, and IMHO these both add flavor (in a way similar to magic items traits tables) but more importantly they do suggest character behaviour to the player during adventures. They are also very easy to ignore, partially or totally, if the player is not so interested in roleplaying. These are much more detailed than alignment and therefore can even help avoiding alignment discussions, if instead of one label (open to everyone's different own interpretation) you have a list of specific ethical traits written on your character sheet.

The inspiration rules are somewhat similar to action points or fate points, but in this case they are instead tied to roleplay decisions, whereas the other systems are often used to reward tactical decisions or solving puzzles/mysteries (or are just granted in fixed amounts). This is quite new to me... In the past it was fairly common to grant bonus XP for good roleplay, and I did that too in the early days, but this is not so good because it can create eventually a gap between good roleplayers and players who are more focused on tactics than RP (and in general, I wouldn't want to reward one and penalize the other). I prefer that everyone gets the same share of XP, and then "good play" is self-rewarding. But good tactical play is self-rewarding in terms of practical outcome (less chance of death, sparing resources etc) while good roleplay sometimes is even against the practical outcome (making a suboptimal choice or a deliberate mistake because of PC's ethical reasons) so this idea of granting some limited bonus for good roleplay sounds actually pretty good to me.

I also like that the bonus lasts only until the end of the current encounter or "scene", because this ties-in well with the description that it's some kind of "morale boost" your PC gets when she's doing what she believes is right on an ethical level. I wouldn't like a situation where a PC thinks "hey, I helped a granny cross the street this morning! this ogre is doomed..."

I am only a bit hesitant with the "pass to other" option, I think I would probably prefer not to have that option or be it a bit more restricted, maybe rephrase it as "you can expend your inspiration to use the Help action as a free action or a reaction". It would be almost the same (Help grants advantage to ability checks and attacks), but it's still under control of the first PC. I wouldn't like this to work as a token-passing mechanic like "here's my inspiration, use it when you need it".
 
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Inspiration as part of the core? Wow, bold move there. Given that this mechanic is a 100% new thing for D&D, I would have expected them to put it in a module.

That said, I like it. It has a lot of potential if they design it right. In fact, I bet I know why they made it core--this is a great way to bring the paladin code into D&DN! Instead of punishing paladins for straying, reward them with extra inspiration for staying on the path. "Inspired warrior" fits the paladin concept perfectly.
 

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