NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Micco" data-source="post: 4226695" data-attributes="member: 14806">I, for one, am glad that WotC doesn't provide rules for awarding appropriate roleplaying. It's so clear from their comments that they just don't get it that there is no way they could effectively create the right kind of rules. In our games, roleplaying rewards are there to partially compensate players for making decisions that are not optimal for overcoming the key challenge, but are appropriate for the character and their background. It is not about speaking with a high squeaky voice to sound like a gnome. It is about deciding that your character simply cannot kill the demon because it is currently possessing the body of a young and innocent child....even though not killing it will likely lead to the death of many other people in the future. And even if it makes completing the "quest" (in 4e terms) more difficult. If that decision is appropriate for the character's history, personality, morality and code of ethics, then I am very comfortable with rewarding the player for maintaining character consistency by making such a decision. In fact, I think that decision is more interesting (and hence inherently more rewardable) than the thousand times the character will decide to kill the monster during his career.And such decisions do represent experience that advance the character's ability to deal with such situations more effectively in the future...which is the whole conceptual underpinning of the XP mechanic.People who comment that roleplaying is "amateur acting" so don't get the concept that they have no business trying to codify a ruleset to reward the appropriate behavior. Fine. In fact, good.Let's recognize that not everyone thinks that "roleplaying" (and by this I think most people think "acting") is fun. I agree that that definition of roleplaying should be it's own reward. But  the definition of roleplaying which involves making decisions in a character's context (rather than the players) is more fundamental, in my opinion, to the genre. But I don't think the WotC designers agree with me on this. That's okay by me...I'll run the game my way.So let those that wish to play war games do so without the complexity of roleplaying. Let the actors go for it and we'll all reap the benefits (at least from the good ones.) As for me and my gang, we will reward good play in all it's forms. And that includes "roleplaying XP" for maintaining character consistency even when it sucks to do so.</blockquote>

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