Should stats have any bearing on roleplay?

[Mark CMG]

I let people roelplay through a situation and then I modify the result based on their PC ability scores/stats. I want to encourage, or at least not discourage, roleplaying while still honoring the scores on the character sheet. People don't need a GM or to sit around a table together for a "roleplaying game" if it's all just going to boil down to the generated numbers.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Don't forget, stats cut both ways.

I HATE it when smart players playing stupid PCs nevertheless do the bulk of the problem-solving:

Player: "The safe/trapped doors in the multi-door rooms follow a Fibonacci sequence! In the next room, the 8th door will be safe, and after that, door #13 is the one we want!"

DM: *grrrrrrrr* "Didn't your character sheet explain your PC's low Int as being the result of accumulated brain damage from repeated head-trauma as a child and young teen?"

That's an issue of challenging the players with a puzzle, rather than the characters. Either some mechanic needs to have been present to allow the characters to recognize the Fibonacci sequence (such as making a secret Intelligence or Mathematics or Engineering check in each room) or the problem solving needs to be done in a metagame way (sure, the player of the barbarian actually figured out what was going on, but everyone agrees that it was the wizard character who actually did the exposition of the solution in the game world).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You're missing my point- even if you're using a game mechanic to resolve the solution, if a smart player has a flash of insight and the puzzle's solution is simple to act upon, he can circumvent the challenge if he doesn't play his PC's Int score. His moronic PC can keep choosing the right door as if he were Rain Man.

I did that once, sort of. I had a flash of insight that unraveled the entire symbology of a cult and by doing so, revealed the hidden plotline. And I blurted it out. The difference was I was playing the second smartest PC in the party- a Halfling ftr/rogue.

Had I been the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks-with-no-bottom barbarian, I might have suggested the meaning of ONE of the symbols as maybe reminding him of something a shaman said to him as a kid...not revealing a huge Illuminati-esque grand plot in a step-by-step Poirot-like reveal.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

One way to handle that is to play a low Int character as ssslllooowww of thought, rather than stupid.

'Hey, Borag, what's wrong?'
'I'm finkin''
'About what?'
'Dat'
'Right... let me know how that works out for you....'
...
...
...
'Still finkin'....'
...
...
...
'Dere's sumfin wrong wid dem symbols....'
...
...
...
'Why dere only tree?'
...
...
...
'Where's four?'

Do it right and sometimes the other players will pick up on it before you either grind to a halt or blurt out the answer....

The Auld Grump, ogres in my homebrew are like that, good mathematicians and philosophers, just ssslllooowww....

 

[MinistryOfGame]

Or, as I said, just change the nature of the cult so that it doesn't match their precognition. Reality is yours to command!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The DM I did that to had worked in it for a while...and changing the cult would have required massive ret-conning.

 

[MinistryOfGame]

If the players haven't worked out the whole scheme until the point you blurted it out, the retconning is surely only going on in the mind/notes of the DM - unless you're talking about an epic reveal of the kind in The Usual Suspects et al, where everything the players have been through for the past X weeks/months points to it, and you lose the massive Aha moment. I'd probably still retcon.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

...unless you're talking about an epic reveal of the kind in The Usual Suspects et al, where everything the players have been through for the past X weeks/months points to it, and you lose the massive Aha moment.

Metaphorically speaking, I even told them Kaiser Söse's shoe size, cell phone number, favorite color, the code to the wall safe in his Maltese hideaway, his craving for chocolate-covered pretzels and the name of the sled he had as a child. It was a pretty thorough reveal.

In terms of timing, I'd say it was 1/3 to 1/2 the way through the planned story arc.

He wanted to "taaaaaaaake oooonnn meeeeeee, taaaaaaaake meeeeee ooooonnnn..."

 

[Leatherhead]

True, but with a problem like the one described, once the solution is blurted out, the puzzle is solved.

And if the player is particularly smart, the next time, he won't blurt out the answer, but merely test his hypothesis out "at random."

That's one of the major problems with puzzles. They are far too metagamey for RPing.

 

[Hautamaki]

That's one of the major problems with puzzles. They are far too metagamey for RPing.

I'd say the problem lies with intelligence being a rolled stat, not with RPGs in general. In my system PCs are as smart as the players want to play them to be. It avoids all these issues of intelligent players rping blockheads or blockheads rping geniuses.