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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 2491082" data-attributes="member: 3146">The real question is what you want to encourage when you say you want to encourage "role-playing."Do you want to encourage players adopting hideous accents and spending entire sessions in the bar trying to pick up the wenches? Or do you want to encourage players choosing "Victory or Death!" or risking the extra AoO to banish the good ousiders who are attacking them rather than killing them, or choosing whether or not to sell the expensive magic weapon they found (that none of them would use) to the highest bidder who happens to also be evil and up to no good. In other words, do you want to encourage acting out or role-playing? (For those who were debating the distinction earlier on the thread, it can be summed up in this: acting out is converting the game into bad impromptu theatre without a plot (and usually making lots of fort saves to avoid getting drunk); role-playing is taking on the character's persona and making decisions from the character's perspective within the world and plot framework provided in the game.)There are different ways to encourage both kinds of activity. A "role-playing" xp award usually encourages the first. IME, people see it as an incentive to play flamboyant characters and a disincentive toward stoic characters as well as an incentive to do everything they can to derail the plot and stop the action of the game. To encourage the second, the best thing you can do is not to offer additional rewards for "role-playing" but rather to craft the encounters so that they demand choices of the players. Any situation where one kind of character will make a different choice from another kind of character is going to generate role-playing of the second type. For instance, in the "selling the magic weapon" scenario I mentioned earlier, any character who plays it will have to decide whether money or conscience are more important to them. (They'll also have to decide how cautious they are about their sales--if they're not cautious, they might not even discover that the buyer is evil). Similarly, a character who is chasing the bad guy when the bad guy tramples innocents underfoot and leaves them in negative hit points (bleeding out) will have to decide whether to save the innocents or continue after the bad guy.</blockquote>

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