COMING SOON! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7637486" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I play D&D all the time. From a rules standpoint, it doesn’t do a whole lot to help roleplaying. In 5E, you have your class which defines your overall role as part of the party. You have your race and background which give some idea of your role in society. You have your alignment which gives you your overall moral views. There’s a bit of overlap with them, but that’s what these things do. In addition to that, 5E has Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. These things give you some more specific facets of your character. This is the kind of thing I think most long time players have always done to some extent, but now it’s formalized as part of character creation.So these are the elements of the 5E D&D rules that pertain to roleplaying. You certainly can come up with a limitless combination of them to create a unique character.But none of them have strong mechanical implications. Even alignment has lost its teeth. The idea of switching alignment used to be a kind of scary thing. There could be severe repercussions if it happened. Not any more. Now you can play your character however you want. Other than race and class and background, the other stuff could shift if the player decided. Have a flaw that comes up at a really inconvenient time? Ignore it! Tempted to steal despite your Lawful Good alignment? Shift To Neutral!With minimal effort, any such change can be justified with fictional reasoning. Without any rules to incentivize roleplay, it becomes uncertain and inconsistent. Sure, a group of players may revel in their characters and “play them true” regardless of how challenging that may make things for them. That’s great! I think my group largely does that. So while there are things in D&D that help players roleplay, they aren’t all that compelling. Nor are they really unique to D&D. Most games have similar elements to class, race, background, and so on. At best, D&D 5E allows players to decide what they’d like for their character...which can be a good thing. But as you’ve pointed out, there are pros and cons to everything. We could just as easily say that D&D 5E allows players to be totally inconsistent in how they portray their character.</blockquote>

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