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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4984548" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, I think I do.  Of course, as I say that, your explanation leaves me somewhat baffled, so that I find it hard to credit that you mean what you say.With you so far.I don't you are expressing yourself clearly here.  There is not semmantic difference between between "look at his 6 int and immediately assume his character is stupid" and "understands that he has a poor chance of sucess whenever that mechanic is tested".  These are the same approach.  I can make an elaborate argument to prove it, but I don't think there is a need in your case.  I think you'll see there is nothing organic about the latter approach that fits the definition you supplied earlier, nor does it match the description you must made of the 'extreme of the second style' or the sentense which follows after it:Ok, back with you.Surely you mean the that the mechanics dictate results where they come into play, and then the player responds by offering a personality to match the results??  If the player offers the personality first, then its a type 1 approach of making the results fit the personality rather than a type 2 approach of making the personality fit the results.Ok, now we are back on the same page.I think your argument is being somewhat led astray by the particular mechanics of a particular system.  I think you'll want to agree that if we are going to describe an approach to roleplaying, that the two approaches need to be general enough to adapt to any fortune system we might adopt.  In this case, I think you are looking at the D20 system with its initially small bonuses and high degree of randomness as saying, "Hypothetically speaking, its possible that even a low int character could pass a series of skill checks", and while this is true, it wouldn't make him 'intelligent' as far as the D20 system is concerned because intelligence manifests itself in various other ways in the D20 system (number of skills, access to literal feats of intelligence).  But, even more, we can easily device hypothetical games where ones score was itself the fortune mechanic (a bidding system, for example), in which case its clear that even these wierd edge cases go away and we can look at the two approaches without being distracted by the mechanics of a particular system.    If the device start unveiling a compensating braggart against the wishes and perhaps without even the knowledge of the player, then it is because the player is a compensating braggart - not the character.  And if the player is unconsciously playing himself, then he's just being himself.  He might be roleplaying in the sense used in psychology (but likely not even that, in as much as when you role play in that sense you are aware that you are practicing with yourself and not playing an outsized ego driven version of yourself because you are a compensating braggert), but he's not really imagining an alternate self or taking on a persona informed by the game in any way.  And in this sense, the player isn't either a type 1 or type 2 role player, because he's not role playing.  He is failing in his role play.  He is trying to play something, but portraying quite unconsciously something else.  And the thing he unconsciously creates is likely as not to be annoying - probably even more so than the player is annoying because he's playing a pretentious outsized unhibited version of himself.This brings me back to the central point of my responce to you.  If I am a player at the table, and I being observed in my play by other players and the DM, and if I am being a good role player it will be impossible for you to tell whether I am a type 1 or a type 2 role player.  You will not be able to tell from my play, whether, when a waiter comes to me and says, "Can I bring you your favorite dish?", and I rattle off, "I'd like a mushroom ragout with beef and a bottle of good madiera.", whether I made up my favorite dish on the spot or whether I already knew my favorite dish because I brainstormed up a bunch of personality traits for my character days ahead of beginning play and have them all wrote down on note cards that I study between sessions. I have personal experience with this effect.  I once played a character who was a professor of English Literature who was an expert in Shakespeare.  To play this character convincingly, I spent a few hours each week memorizing passages of Shakespeare that I thought would be likely to pertain to something that might come up in play.  As a result, when I played the character, virtually everyone I played with became convinced that in real life I was an English Literature major and that I was simply spouting off Shakespeare quotations as they occurred to me.Other than to demonstrate that you can't tell whether something is type 1 or type 2 by observing it when it is done well, the other point of bringing up one of my triumphs as an example is I think it shows clearly that there is certainly some aspect of portraying an intelligence and knowledgable character that has no real bearing on the mechanics.  Knowing alot of Shakespeare was a convincing personification of the character I was animating, but if the character I was animating had no ranks in 'Knowledge (Literature)' (or whatever it would be called in whatever system) and a low intelligence, my elevated diction and extended quotations would be completely out of character regardless of whether we ever even made a skill check.  Whether I am type 1 or type 2, I won't make a character know lots of Shakespeare unless there is a mechanical basis for that knowledge.  All that will differ is the extent to which I have preinvented the excuses for my successes, but in practice my preinventions should be indistinguishable from my postinventions.Well, surely this is true of both type 1 and type 2 approaches to play.  If adopting a type 2 approach where the dice dictated how you percieved the character, surely this puts a limit on how your character could grow every bit as much as prejudging where those dice would be likely to lie.And again, surely if you divorse personality from mechanics and leave it up to the dice, there is a real danger that the randomness of the dice will dictate you will never have a personality all, but have an unfixed nature that is tossed about by every whim of chance.  Surely the only certain path to character growth in a particular area of skill is mechanical, whether we leave our judgement of player skill and interpretation of the intersection of skill and luck to before or after the fortune mechanic because if we are leaving the dice to determine our growth we won't see any until the dice start to consistantly portray it.</blockquote>

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