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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5835575" data-attributes="member: 54877">If you refuse to roleplay during combat, and thus switch modes, that would have some truth to it. However, if roleplaying is the overarching thing you do at the table most of time, regardless of subject matter, then that would be categorically false. Lack of roleplaying happens at our table when people get tired or distracted. The activities of the characters are irrelevant. We would consider anyone incapble of roleplaying during combat a poor roleplayer. But we could go round and round on this, but let me try to cut through the muck. For my group, on this question, Paizo-style adventures pretty much suck. That doesn't make WotC adventures better. They merely suck in a different way. (I'm of course generalizing here to emphasize the point. The quality is actually all over the place.)  This is because a linear adventure, with not much thought put into running a more sandbox game, doesn't particular help in the roleplaying department. I'll have to fill in all kinds of gaps, take out pieces and change them, etc. OTOH, a story-based series (even with a gloss of "event-based" to hide the tracks), also isn't much help in the roleplaying department. Here, I've got a bit more useful material to take out and change, but I've also got a lot of dross to sift through to find that useful material. When I read the first, my eyes glaze over. When I read the second, I want to sling it against the wall (and have a couple of times). Neither of these characteristics adds one iota of roleplaying to our sessions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> "Predefined Plot" is not "Roleplaying". Such things may be very useful to you and others as an aid to roleplaying. But where you may see "Interesting NPC with full background and stats to interact with," I too often see, "Amateur novelist gets too cute writing about his pet NPC and forgets to give me useful adventure information." You know, in this adventure where my players' characters are supposed to be the stars, but I have to work overtime to get around some "high drama" equivalent of a "Mary Sue". And just to be absolutely clear, I don't object to you or anyone else getting a lot of use out of such adventures (or NPCs or plots therein). I do object to this repeated (and rather unexamined and ignorant) assumption that having certain widgets on your character sheet and certain techniques in your adventure modules is the heart and soul of all roleplaying everywhere, all the time. And anyone without these things is merely playing a "tactical game". If your group played 4E, that might be what you'd get. I don't know if you would adapt your techniques or not, and its hard to guess at what might be. I do know that I get more actual roleplaying at my table out of evocative bits than I ever got out of Paizo plots.</blockquote>

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