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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6209093" data-attributes="member: 4937">I definitely can understand that, but as a guy whose spent 95% of his career as a DM, the realization that the world is limited by my understanding talents and capabilities is something that impressed itself on me in a hurry.You can't just have an NPC with Perform(Jokes) +20 or Wit +20, and say, "He tells a joke. *roll* It's very funny, and you involuntarily begin laughing", if what you want to achieve is the effect of the player finding the NPC funny.  Or at least, you might, but they'd not be laughing at what you wanted them to laugh at, and the joke would get tired fast.  If you want NPC's to have magnetic personalities, you can't rely on a roll of a die to achieve the effect, because by convention PC's usually aren't subject to behavior change by mundane charisma interaction and in any event forcing the PC to behave in some way against the player's will is a very different result than convincing the player to behave in some way of their own accord.   One put's the player very much on their guard, and the other - almost by definition - doesn't.   So it's very very obvious to a DM that social skills aren't the same as physical skills.  Your NPC's can easily tumble through the air and jump over small buildings in a single bound, even though you can't.   But your NPC's can't be witty, entertaining, impressive, or even knowledgeable if you can't pull that off in your play.  This isn't the result of the players being unfair to you.  This is just the way it is.  It's very obvious as the DM you can't blame the players for the failure of your NPC's to be what you imagined them to be. There are limits to what you can pull off as a role-player.  It's a learning process increasing your skills as a player so that you can pull off more and more sorts of improvisation and more and more different sorts of roles.  You have to except that to some extent, RPG's are like other games - you get better at them through practice.  It's a big skill set.  I've been playing for 30 years and I've still got lots to learn.Speaking as an introvert, the best system for introverts is learning to role play.  Once I learned to do it in game, I started putting it into practice outside of the game.  In fact, the name I go by in real life was very consciously created as a persona of a person who wasn't introverted, and began life with very conscious efforts to imagine what a non-introverted person would do and how they would behave.  Being who I am, this involved library research.Definitely.  I've had those players.  But equally, it's very hard to address as a systems issue, because what do you really want as a player - the game to tell you what to do?  To become an observer of your own character?  To sit there while the DM fills in all the blanks for you, like the experience of a cRPG where when you select 'talk to the character' the game decides what you say and what you are allowed to say?  It's certainly tempting as a DM.  There are times I can't resist going, "Are you really sure you want to do that?"  There are even times when it's appropriate (the player is acting with a lack of information about the setting that the character wouldn't have).  But if you stop the game for a 'wisdom check' or 'intelligence check' often enough, you might as well tell the story solo.I've also had players that 'ego game' (seeking self-validation through the success they achieve in the fiction) who in every scene want desperately to pull off that shining moment of awesomeness, and so instead of waiting to let it happen try to push the issue, resulting in repeated spectacular failures because of the rash and unnecessarily complicated plans they try to implement.  This leads to a lot of them getting frustrated, especially since their character often ends up becoming a figure of fun and comic relief, or jealous if another more relaxed player keeps getting moment's of awesome without apparently trying (which in turn can lead to accusations of favoritism).  Dealing with players who are frustrated because they can't be the character they see in their mind is always challenging.  Some don't want to accept that they need to learn anything at all as if - just because there are no winners or losers - it is just intuitive being good at tactics, theatrics, investigation, dungeoneering, and systems mastery.  You've got to be encouraging, understanding, and you have to mentor.  It's fun watching the player level up though.Hitting something with a stick is intuitive even to a two year old. It would be possible to design a social system which would be on par with a combat system.  Some well meaning designers intending to encourage role play as a focus of play, and to empower players who were uncomfortable with social interaction to be able to live out the fiction of a high charisma character have tried just that.  The problem with it is social challenges would then in turn tend to have game play that resembles combat, which means that they effectively are just more combat, and the entire goal of encouraging role play fails.  I think the more pragmatic solution to this problem tends to be to make combat resolution more resemble social interaction resolution, emphasizing that this game really isn't supposed to be about combat at all.</blockquote>

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