Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TKDB" data-source="post: 6022547" data-attributes="member: 6690697">The others in the thread have more or less covered all the main points, but I just want to pitch in my two cents:I can definitely sympathize with your complaints, but I see it as a necessary evil for the sake of making the game more fair for a broader spectrum of players. Handling things like social interaction and trapfinding entirely through roleplay, without getting dice involved, is certainly more interesting, but it also limits the range of character types a person can play. Sure, you can handle a high-Cha character played by a socially awkward player as someone who's awkward at first glance but likable when you get to know them...but that still doesn't let a socially awkward player play a silver-tongued smooth-talker. Similarly, a player who's not very good at puzzling out potential traps and ways to find them isn't going to have much luck playing a master thief (who realistically should have no difficulty with such things, seeing as it's part of the job description).Essentially, you wind up with a game where some things (mainly physical tasks, like attacks in combat or feats of strength) are based on in-character capabilities, while others (mainly mental tasks, such as the aforementioned social interactions and trapfinding) are based on out-of-character capabilities. You can be a paraplegic and still play the most agile acrobat in the world, but in terms of how you actually interact with the game world, your character will only ever be as eloquent or clever (not to be confused with knowledgeable -- I mean clever in the sense of things like being able to find and safely deal with traps and so forth) as you are as a player.D&D is fundamentally a form of escapism. While 3rd edition's skill mechanics may impede that in the sense that they tend to dispose players toward strictly mechanical interaction with the game world rather than immersive roleplay, they also promote it by giving players who want to play characters with mental faculties exceeding those the player possesses in real life a way to make that a tangible reality in terms of how the character interacts with the game world. Ultimately, I feel it's better for a system to have such mechanics, because while they may tend to discourage immersive roleplaying, they do not entirely preclude it. While not "easy", I feel it is easier to bring roleplaying into a game that leans toward "rollplaying" than it is to properly represent characters with mental faculties exceeding those of their players in a system that doesn't have mechanical representations of those faculties apart from player's roleplaying.</blockquote>

Verification