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Skilled Play, or Role Play: How Do You Approach Playing D&D?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8155399" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>Put me in the “why not both?” camp.</p><p></p><p>I’m of the opinion that both player skill and avatar strength are important and neither should be ignored. The player skill component comes in with the action declaration - making good decisions about what to do will improve your chances of success. The avatar strength component comes in with the dice mechanics - having higher scores in the appropriate stats provides insurance against failure when you need to roll to resolve an action. </p><p></p><p>These components also feed into each other, as one element of player skill is learning to take actions that play to your avatar’s strengths. If you have high dexterity and low strength for example, it is skilled play to try to emphasize physical actions that are more rooted in agility and precision than direct force.</p><p></p><p>As for roleplaying, I am firmly of the opinion that roleplaying is no more and no less than the act of imagining yourself as another person and/or in a hypothetical scenario, and making decisions as you imagine you or that other person would in that scenario. Now, sometimes that might mean making decisions you as yourself wouldn’t make - the classic example of course being the low-Intelligence character eschewing the strategically superior option in favor of a more immediately gratifying option. And that’s fine. But it should always be the player’s decision what their character “would do.” It’s also an element of player skill to create characters who “would” be likely to make good strategic and tactical choices.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8155399, member: 6779196"] Put me in the “why not both?” camp. I’m of the opinion that both player skill and avatar strength are important and neither should be ignored. The player skill component comes in with the action declaration - making good decisions about what to do will improve your chances of success. The avatar strength component comes in with the dice mechanics - having higher scores in the appropriate stats provides insurance against failure when you need to roll to resolve an action. These components also feed into each other, as one element of player skill is learning to take actions that play to your avatar’s strengths. If you have high dexterity and low strength for example, it is skilled play to try to emphasize physical actions that are more rooted in agility and precision than direct force. As for roleplaying, I am firmly of the opinion that roleplaying is no more and no less than the act of imagining yourself as another person and/or in a hypothetical scenario, and making decisions as you imagine you or that other person would in that scenario. Now, sometimes that might mean making decisions you as yourself wouldn’t make - the classic example of course being the low-Intelligence character eschewing the strategically superior option in favor of a more immediately gratifying option. And that’s fine. But it should always be the player’s decision what their character “would do.” It’s also an element of player skill to create characters who “would” be likely to make good strategic and tactical choices. [/QUOTE]
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