genshou said:
I still don't see how people aren't acting in-character when they move a few feet to the side so they can flank the minotaur, or avoid running right past a line of orcs in order to avoid being stabbed to death.
I mean, maybe I'm just strange, but I like to try to maximize my advantages and, above all else, try to stay alive and more or less unharmed when I fight. I don't think it's unrealistic for my characters to have the same goal.
I don't disagree with this at all. More generally, I should re-iterate that by roleplaying I don't mean what Third Wizard seems to - namely, a lot of in-character dialogue and rich description of character actions. Nor do I mean the making of sub-optimal choices, like deliberately getting hit or killed for no good reason. What I do mean by rolepalying (and I think it is also what Lost Soul has in mind) is character actions which reflect particular roleplaying commitments the player has made, through both the build and the play of his or her character.
With this conception of roleplaying in mind, I gave my reasons for preferring verbal description to battlemat in an earlier post. Broadly, it was that verbal description makes it easier for the referee to give different information to different characters that reflects each character's position, skills (especially perception skills) and so on. This is not to discourage PCs from choosing clever tactics. Rather, it is to create an environment where those choices are more likely to reflect the roleplaying commitments on the character sheets (eg a choice to put few ranks in perception reflects a commitment to playing a character who is easily lost in the "fog of battle").
In comparison, I feel that a battlemat leads to a certain homogenisation of character response to the battle, because all of them have a general's-eye view of the situation.
Under verbal description it is very easy for a character to roleplay the fact that they haven't heard what another character has called out over the din of battle, because all that's required is for that other character not to speak to them, but only to the GM, or those other players whose characters can hear. But on a battlemat, I think it is harder to play that situation. In fact, the need for characters to call for aid, issue instructions or whatever becomes much less, because every player can see the tactical situation and the urgency of responding to it in various ways without any need for character-to-character communication.
Hussar critiqued my sort of approach above (although he did moderate the critique a bit later on) on the basis that it is unrealistic that adventurers would not notice what's going on on the battlefield. But I find that, especially in high level play, it is not that unrealistic. On a battlefield which has a number of characters able to fly at 60' per second, invisible or teleporting foes, obscuring terrain (or very big foes who are themselves obscuring terrain for anyone in melee with them!), spell casters screaming out magic in arcane languages, paladins whose weapons are singing inspring songs of courage, and so on, I think that any single character's ability to take in all the action, round by round, does depend to a significant extent on that character's perception skills. (Espcially because I don't play a very dungeon or trap-heavy game, the combat advantage of good perception is a major reason why some players build characters who are good at it.)
Even in low-to-mid level play, think of a scene like the final battle in the first Lord of the Rings movie. Part of the excitement and drama stems from the fact that not every protagonist has perfect information about the shape and progress of the battle. A battlemat provides that information, and therefore (I believe) makes it harder for roleplay to reflect its absence.
To return to a different point I made earlier, a mechanic which gave PCs the power to determine certain scene details which have not been specified by the GM, and which might be relevant for tactical decision-making (eg is the villain's room lit by lanterns - a ready source of oil - or by candles?) would not discourage tactical play in the sense you describe above, but it may be likely to encourage a certain type of roleplay (closer to what Three Wizards has in mind), namely, greater player immersion in the details of the scene, and a greater readiness to look for little points of tactical advantage that depend on as-yet unspecified details.
I hope the above explains why I agree with a lot of what you and Hussar have said about the relationship between tactics and roleplaying, but still think that a battlemat can make roleplaying harder, and also think that the mechanics of character creation, action resolution and so on can have an important effect on roleplaying.
