POLL: Is how you Roleplay influenced by your character’s mental stats?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yet, one rarely (if ever) sees suggestions that 1st level characters should be role-played as incompetent, foolish, or awkward.

Outside of Dungeon Crawl Classics, anyway.

 

[JohnSnow]

Your poll's results thus far - in order 3-14-0-4-3 - would suggest otherwise...

I get what you're saying, but my poll doesn't actually have a middle option.

"Other" is explicitly removed from the ranking metric (Yes, Partially, Not Really, No). It's "None of the Above."

But if you ever put together a poll with "rank the options - 1-5 stars)," you'll see a LOT of 3's.

 

[JohnSnow]

And so far, it seems that the answer is mostly "Yes," "Yes, but with caveats" or "It's complicated," with a few outliers choosing "Not at all!"

 

[cranberry]

Whenever I make a bad in-game decision, I just blame it on my PCs low INT score..

 

[Voadam]

I don't sweat the numbers on the sheet as a PC or a DM. I generally prefer for everybody to be focused on playing cool characterization concepts that are fun to interact with rather than try and emulate any specific sheet stat.

Generally as a player I don't look over other character's sheets, I just interact with them as characters. The portrayal, the characterization is the point of interaction, and so that is what comes across as of value or not.

My roleplaying guides personally are usually more a concept (refugee who is poor and starting anew, noble aristocrat duelist, act like you are in a Frazetta painting, etc.) or just playing and riffing and seeing what develops.

D&D stats are multidimensional to the point that you can justify most anything under any stat. Someone who is ugly but charming could reasonably be represented in most D&D edition charisma definitions with a low, average, or high charisma.

I know plenty of smart people who are regularly dumb in one aspect of their life. I am completely fine with saying a high int character is a technical specialist in their field of wizardry and their mechanical int skills for skill rolls while having the individual character be whatever in how they come across in thinking through problems and decision making.

For me a big part of RPGs is the immersive experience of being the character in the moment. Thinking about trying to emulate stats takes away from that a bit.

 

[JohnSnow]

Yeah Voadam, I pretty much figured that's how you'd vote, seeing as it was our discussion that inspired my poll.

 

[Perambulator]

Your poll's results thus far - in order 3-14-0-4-3 - would suggest otherwise...

Of course you do need to consider the present audience.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I'm not a player, but I expect my players to use their sheet as a base for their roleplaying. If they don't, they can go do freeform stateless roleplaying at another table.

 

[Voadam]

I wonder how much things would vary broken down by stat generation method (B/X was roll 3d6 six times in order for lower random stats versus 1e UA human rolls charts where you generally had really good stats across the board and really strong ones in your prechosen class primary abilities, versus 3e and on default point buys).

Also by whether people's games are based around playing the same character for a long campaign or high lethality ones with a lot of character turnover or plenty of one shots where new characters trying out different things are the norm.

 

[Irlo]

I'm not a player, but I expect my players to use their sheet as a base for their roleplaying. If they don't, they can go do freeform stateless roleplaying at another table.

How do you decide that someone is roleplaying too charismatically for their ability score?