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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hella_Tellah" data-source="post: 4516779" data-attributes="member: 52669">Rewarding people with numerical bonuses for roleplaying seems counter-productive to me.  The problem is that the players are focused on number-crunching and tactics to the exclusion of the storytelling aspects you enjoy.  Rewarding them with tactical, number-crunching rewards doesn't shift that focus.You can get around that by finding ways to make good roleplaying its own reward.  Think of all of the really epic moments of roleplay from your gaming career.  If you're like me, they were moments that the game went "off book", away from the storyline the DM set up, making new and interesting situations that no one at the table had thought of five minutes prior.  The player who roleplays well can bypass challenges, get a retinue of attendents and mercenaries to do his bidding, launch an orc from a trebuchet in order to strike fear in the hearts of the castle's defenders, etc.  That's where tabletop gaming really shines.  That's where it offers an experience you can't get anywhere else.  When the players surprise the DM, it's a glorious thing, and it doesn't happen without roleplaying.So here's what you do: present the PCs with challenges that can't be solved with 3[W]+INT damage.  Give them a situation that they can't roll their way out of--a scenario in which they can't just pick a skill, roll it, and move on.  Get them thinking about what their characters would do, and how they want to solve the problem.  All of roleplaying evolves from this.  The epic descriptions, the surprising results, the moments you'll be talking about four years from now, all come from these kinds of situations. You need to give your players a chance to build up this creative part of their brains.</blockquote>

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