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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6206564" data-attributes="member: 17106">Playing the role and playing to an audience are separate considerations. Acting is a broader envelope than roleplaying. If you want to say that there are other types of acting than method acting, that is true. Method acting is pretty close to what roleplaying is.By a strong, literal definition, I think they aren't. Again, I specified for clarity that I was talking about literal definitions to make a point. There's also a common usage of "roleplaying games" to include a broad variety of cooperative improvisational storytelling games for which we don't have a better name.Case in point, your example rpg du jour, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, is clearly about something other than strictly playing the roles of characters. It posits players as having a much broader role than simply adopting their character's perspective. I don't dislike it; I've been meaning to give it a shot for a while and was sad when it went out of print so soon. In fact, it's precisely the game's departure from the D&D mentality on roleplaying that interests me. But it is something of a misnomer.It would be nice if we could come up with clearer and more descriptive vocabulary to describe all these approaches.I think the point here is that the game we're talking about was clearly written with a certain social contract and division of power in mind. If you want to play it differently, that's fine, but it will radically change balance issues.For example, if you switch from the DM as final arbiter of the rules to making players arbiters of their own skills, you run the risk of turning a perfectly reasonable Diplomacy skill into "Diplomancy". If you do this, you're responsible for managing that risk; it's clearly something the designers weren't focused on, because a player with that kind of authority is outside of the paradigm they established.The same thing applies for spellcasters. If you ignore their limitations, choose not to specifically challenge them, and most importantly give players the authority to dictate how their own magic works, they may seem more powerful in your game than they were in the designers' minds or in the playtests. No one's saying you can't play this way, but if you do, it's on you to manage these issues, because you're running a fundamentally different game than the one described in the core rulebooks.And call it pejorative if you will, but the DMG itself explicitly describes "good DMs" in a way that certain posters here think is anathema. That's between them and Skip Williams/Monte Cook/Johnathan Tweet; it's got nothing to do with me. I just read the books and learned to play. I may mess around with rules for character creation and action resolution, but I DM and my players play exactly the way the DMG and PHB say we should. Perhaps it's D&D itself that you find too narrow.</blockquote>

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