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="pemerton" data-source="post: 8486563" data-attributes="member: 42582">To go back to [USER=6787503]@Hriston[/USER]'s OP:Roleplaying - as in, declaring actions for one's PC and more generally describing or portraying how one's PC goes about the gameworld - works differently in different RPGs.To point to two different systems to make the point:In 4e D&D, encounters are resolved either as skill challenges or using the combat rules. In the former context, a player's declared action typically gets translated into a stat/skill check (I say "typically" because there are some exceptions that don't matter for present purposes). So the player is free to declare whatever they like - the player of the low-CHA dwarf can declare social actions, for instance - but the effect of those actions on the fiction will depend on the outcomes of the checks that get made. So the player of the low-CHA dwarf will be less likely to contribute to skill challenge success by declaring social actions than (say) physical ones. This then feeds into encounter design and adudication - as a GM, part of what makes encounters intriguing/compelling/challenging is that the player of the low-CHA dwarf has good reason to want to declare social actions for his PC. This is the non-combat equivalent of designing and/or running a combat encounter in a way that tends to bring the casters, archers and the like into melee, rather than making it easy for them to just hang back and plink away.In Classic Traveller, quite a bit of non-combat action gets resolved by direct adjudication of the fiction, rather than via some sort of mechanical framework like a skill challenge. If a player is playing a PC with low INT or low EDU, then at our table we expect the player to reflect that in how they choose actions for that PC. Conversely, if the player is playing a PC with (to use an example from our game) Jack-of-all-Trades-4 then it's reasonable for them to declare all sorts of MacGyver-y stuff without actually calling for checks (eg fitting custom components onto the PCs' vehicles), and rather just using that to set up the context for the ensuing action.Just like there's no single thing that is playing a board game or playing a card game, it shouldn't be any surprise that there's no single thing that is playing a character in a RPG.</blockquote>

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