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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 1894719" data-attributes="member: 26473">When our group started playing 3.x games it was a bit of an eye-opener for me: I hadn't played since 1e AD&D so the complexity of the new rules was quite a bit different from what I knew - so much of what we used to house-rule on the fly was now covered by mechanics. All but one of the players in our group was O.G. (original gamer) as well. I think anyone looking in on us would have been pretty amused at how basic our tactics were at first - for the fighter-types it was pretty much close-and-bash in true 1e fashion, for example.As time went on and we became more familiar and comfortable with the rules, that chess-board style thinking began to creep into our play. Avoiding AoOs to oneself while forcing them on others became a big deal. About half our group became enamored of this style of play.The other half continued to emphasize roleplaying their characters' responses to combat. For example, the thief (the player disdained the "politically correct" term rogue...O.G., remember?) skulked in the shadows, but didn't necessarily look for opportunities to sneak attack - he would claim (in-character) that he was maneuvering into position to take out the enemy spellcaster, or protecting the party's flanks (even if there was only a single monster in the room). In reality his character did everything he could to avoid getting hit - he didn't mind violence, as long as it wasn't directed at him. His "tactics" were dictated by this character trait, not the battlemat or class mechanics. The thief was more likely to take total defence as a combat action than sneak attack.To me, roleplaying in combat is not describing how the character fights or reacts to damage - that's scene-setting, exposition. Roleplaying in combat is guiding the character's actions during combat in the same way that one would decide the actions in a seedy tavern or an audience with the prince. It's an extension of the character's traits - heroism, cruelty, pacifism, cowardice - into these situations.</blockquote>

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