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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4474408" data-attributes="member: 1054">I greatly prefer mechanical support for roleplaying, or more generally, non-combat abilities. To me, any variant on "If you want to be the blacksmith's son, just write it down on the character sheet and get on with the game" is basically dismissing roleplaying as secondary, or utterly irrelevant, to "what matters". It's saying "This is so unimportant that no character resources need to be allocated to it". The "Well, the DM can just give you a bonus if it seems important" argument can lead to "Well, my character was the son of a blacksmith who was apprenticed to a wizard and was then kidnapped by orcs and was taught alchemy by a shaman before escaping to join the thieves guild until he was pressed into the militia where he became a master of arms and was also a quartermaster so he's good at economics and then he was trapped in the wilderness so he learned survival and pathfinding and then he..." I mean, why not? It's not "costing" you anything to have a background which includes any imaginable skill, right?If something is an important aspect of my character, I want it to have mechanical support. If I'm supposed to be a smooth talker, I want social skills, and if his gift of gab is more important to him than his swordsmanship, I want to the ability to reflect this by choosing improvements to his social skills over his combat ones. I don't want to be stuck arguing with the DM over whether or not my rules-independant background flavor text does or does not matter in a given situation -- I want a skill/feat/power/option/whatever that says if it does, how much it does, and how often it does. Way back in the dawn of time, when I started playing MMORPGs, I would make up elaborate backstories for my characters. Eventually I stopped, because it sank in that there was no point to it, there was no mechanical support for anything but killing, and that you couldn't have goals for your character in the world because the world could not be meaningfully altered. You couldn't dream of assassinating a king or avenging yourself on the orcs, because there was no way to accomplish any goal not pre-programmed. So I just gave in and played like everyone else, questing for the phat l3wtz. I had, after all, P&P games for REAL roleplaying. If you strip the mechanical support for personality traits, goals, motivations, etc, out of a P&P game, though, you're playing an online game with crappy graphics and a server that needs a constant supply of pizza to keep running.</blockquote>

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