I'm a lot more interested in if people are playing interesting characters with fleshed-out personalities and motives than if they're perfectly portraying the random numbers on a sheet of paper.
Why do you think those two can't coincide...?
I'm a lot more interested in if people are playing interesting characters with fleshed-out personalities and motives than if they're perfectly portraying the random numbers on a sheet of paper.
No idiot savants
..no perceptive but unable to read others people
no people who know exactly how to act in public but are completely loathesome in private. Rules don't support it. So sod them.
Less worrying about if you're properly roleplaing 4/8/14/18/whatever INT/WIS/CHA, more worrying about if your character would pass muster as an actual being with actual flaws and strengths that don't involve being utterly perfect or utterly terrible in all aspects of one arbitrary category.
I'd like to see them re-purposed/eliminated in favour of something more useful. Instead of INT you buy/roll for an attribute that determines your book learning and your wizard spellcasting ability. Instead of WIS you get an attribute that determines your resistance to magic and your cleric/druid spellcasting ability. Instead of CHA you get an attribute that determines your social standing and your ability to get people to work for you as well as your Bard/Sorceror spellcasting ability. Your ability to percieve things is divorced from WIS and thrown into a stat/a skill to be bought.
Divorce personality from it entirely, divorce social skills from it entirely and have those rely solely on how much you've bought into them. So you can be an antisocial jerk who can, if he needs to, dazzle everyone around him with his charm...
as well as being blindingly brilliant but refuses to ever study anything...
reads people like books but can't find his glasses to save his life
without worrying about 'uh wait what the hell do I do for stats for that am I doing it wrong if I give him high CHA but then play him like he has none uh...'
Nah, I don't like tieing the roleplay into the mechanics, class archetypes, and character balance. I want characters to be combat balanced regardless of their roleplay.Poppycock. This is one of those lovely rationalizations people throw around, but if you get back to the behavior they are actually defending its easy to see that it haas nothing to with playing 'an actual being with actual flaws' that don't involve being 'utterly perfect'. It's high minded psuedo-intellectual sophistry, since no one in this whole thread has actually stated that they disagreed with me on the grounds that it would prevent them from playing a character with flaws. Rather, every single argument against my point of view has - whatever the stated reasoning - been used to justify playing a character without flaws.
Want to roleplay smart and be mechanically effective? Play these classes but not these other ones.
Aesthetically I prefer not limiting it that way.
I want characters to be combat balanced regardless of their roleplay.
Want to roleplay smart and be mechanically effective? Play these classes but not these other ones.
Aesthetically I prefer not limiting it that way.
This is an entirely tangental issue. Saying this neither disagrees nor agrees with the points I've raised here. I can fully agree with "I want characters to be combat balanced regardless of their roleplay" without in the slightest changing my position. (In fact, I don't fully agree with it, but I'm very sympathetic to the concern and if I was allowed to agree or disagree in a 'fuzzy' way I'd say I 80% agreed with the statement.) If I can fully agree with something without any fear, how is it a point of argument against me?
The statement also doesn't support the one you made that immediately proceeded it except in a limited way. We may or may not choose to tie roleplay to mechanics and class archetypes without really effecting their combat balance. Combat balance is probably the area of the game least effected by the personality of the character, and at least in 3e, int, wis, and chr only impact most character's combat ability in very indirect ways. It's not like 4e where you can use mental attributes almost interchangably with physical ones provided you are of a particular class, and conversely virtually all classses are 'forced' to particular builds emphasising one or the other attribute ('brawny' rogue vs. 'trickster' rogue, for example) (at least until we get builds for every attibute).
Poppycock. This is one of those lovely rationalizations people throw around, but if you get back to the behavior they are actually defending its easy to see that it haas nothing to with playing 'an actual being with actual flaws' that don't involve being 'utterly perfect'. It's high minded psuedo-intellectual sophistry, since no one in this whole thread has actually stated that they disagreed with me on the grounds that it would prevent them from playing a character with flaws. Rather, every single argument against my point of view has - whatever the stated reasoning - been used to justify playing a character without flaws.
I thought I had given a pretty even handed and fair review of my take on the different approaches.
I don't recall at all trying to justify a character without flaws and to be honest I find myself slightly annoyed to have such thoughts attributed to me.
Just because I didn't sit down before the start of play and say my character has flaws ABC and strengths XYZ doesn't mean it's my endeavor to play Mr. Perfect.
Indeed the more organic personality that is created at the intersection of mechanical and player input is never going to be perfect and frankly in my opinion his flaws are more likely to be subtle and realistic.
And I think there is a lot of good fun to be had discovering the nature of characters' personalities over the course of play.
Social and mental stats are either tangential and not important mechanically or they have significant mechanical impact in 3e.
If you are a melee fighter in 3e int and charisma are not as important for your combat ability as is your strength and constitution or your dexterity and wisdom.
If you make a fighter who is a capable leader and you tie this in with stats you put points into his charisma with no combat effect and therefore fewer stat points into his combat relevant stats.
You could say leadership is a charisma trait (as the srd does) and sorcerers should generally be leaders followed by paladins as decent ones while fighters should generally not lead. If a fighter wants to be a good leader he should sacrifice his combat stats to get the charisma of an optimized paladin even though he gains nothing mechanically for combat from this choice and takes away from his combat power to do so. To be as good as a sorcerer at leading he should have a stat array similar to a sorcerer and pay the combat price for doing so. This is a class archetype argument in favor of tieing stats to roleplay.
I have no aesthetic preference for making fighters pay such a combat value tax to roleplay as good a leader type.
Lewis Pulsipher said:In the early days of fantasy role-playing (FRP) gaming, many players did not roleplay in any significant sense of the word; that is, they did not pretend or imagine that they were in a real world different from our own. Instead, they made a farce out of FRP, and their characters tended to act like thugs or gangsters, if not fools. Pursuit of power, without regard for anything else, was typical.
In reaction and rebuttal to this, some players went to the other extreme. They believed that characters, through their players, [sic] should imagine themselves as fulfilling a role in the real world, and further declared that each character should be a personality completely separate from the player, so that the player becomes more of an actor than a participant in a game. For several years these people were voices crying out in the wilderness, but as more people gained FRP experience or heard about this “improvisational theater” (or “persona-creator”) school of role-playing, and as the more articulate and vociferous of the “persona” extremists found an audience for their views, this extreme attitude about roleplaying has spread so widely that it, instead of not role-playing at all, seems to have become the standard.
Unfortunately, because initially they had to express their views about roleplaying with maximum emphasis just to be listened to, many of the people in this second group have become intolerant of other views. One occasionally runs into remarks at conventions or in articles which disparage anyone who does not create an elaborate persona for each of his
characters, each different from his own personality. The most hard-line advocates of this school of thought refuse to believe that there is any other “proper” way to play, and they measure the skill of a roleplaying gamer in accordance with how closely he or she meets their notions of role-playing as theater.
There is a third group, with an attitude that lies between the power-mad, thug character players on one hand and the persona-creators on the other. The viewpoint of these people, who may be called “vicarious participators,” reflects the original intent of role-playing gaming. They (and I number myself among them) believe that the point of a role-playing game is to put oneself into a situation one could never experience in the real world, and to react as the player would like to think he would react in similar circumstances.
In other words, the game lets me do the things I’d like to think I would do if I were a wizard, or if I were a fighter, or perhaps, even, if I decided to take the evil path. Consequently, it would be foolish for me to create a personality quite different from my own, because it would no longer be me. The game is not a matter of Sir Stalwart does so-and-so” but “I do so-and-so.” In my imagination, I am the one who might get killed — not some
paper construct, however elaborate it may be. (Of course, because these are games played by people with adult mentality —even if not of adult age — no one ever becomes overinvolved emotionally.)
The most important point I want to make is that there is nothing superior about the persona-creation method of role-playing. Vicarious participation is neither less mature, nor less intelligent, nor less “true blue” than persona creation, though all these claims have been made at times. Persona-creators should accept that many players simply do not want to become actors. Refereeing requires quite enough acting for most of us, for the referee must separate himself completely from his non-player characters or he cannot be objective and impartial -- he must be a persona-creator in order to be a good referee. Perhaps this is the clearest indication that persona creation is no better than vicarious participation:
Many excellent referees, who are necessarily excellent persona-creators, nonetheless prefer vicarious participation when they play. The vicarious style is a matter of choice, not of inability to act.