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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 3057227" data-attributes="member: 8835">I agree with buzz on everything but this.  But even on his point above, there's a balance to be stuck (which is where I believe his stance comes from).If you literally write a story as the adventure, then yeah, it'll suck.  It'll be a railroad.  Players will hate it.  If you let the players drive the action, odds are good, you'll just get a dungeon crawl.  And those don't make good stories.  Sure the time you killed a dragon using a toothbrush and a wand of wonder is funny, but that's not novel worthy material.The fact is, if you want the players to enjoy a story, you've got to write the front half of the novel.  Build interesting NPCs, get a few plots going that they players will get engrossed in. Then you've got to let the PCs drive the 2nd half of the story.  You can't plan on how it'll end.Based on that, if you want more role-playing and less combat, you've got to have NPCs and plots in a world that can't solve every problem by stabbing it or setting it on fire.  To do that, will take some thinking and planning.  Probably the biggest factor is NPCs gotta have secrets.  And at some point, secrets gotta be found and shared.  Getting the PCs to interact with NPCs verbally is how yer gonna get roleplaying to happen.  Giving them problems to solve that fighting won't help will open that door.  You might also want to give XP for roleplaying.Think in terms of % for XP.  It takes 13 encounters to level up (per average Monte-Math).  If a game lasts 6 hours, and an encounter takes an hour, that's 6 encounters.  That's also almost 50% of the XP needed to level in one session.  Let's assume you like that rate.  Let's assume you cut the fighting back to 3 combat encounters.  That means 50% from fighting, 50% from say roleplaying.  From here, you just gotta have cool ways to dish out XP.  We know the leveling is level times 1000. We also know that combat XP is basically 300 times the CR. So here's some ideas:give level times 100 points for playing in character.  This means that for most of the game, we could see a difference between you and your PC, and it was consistent in form, and style.  An accent, vocal patterns, word selection, etc.  It doesn't have to be fancy, it just should sound like you with all the modern slang.give level times 300 points for each encounter the PCs talked their way through that could have ended in trouble or heavy combat for the PCs had they not talked their way out of it.Heck, the above is just a few ways to reward the non-combat aspects of gaming.  But they could result in a change in mentality.</blockquote>

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