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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffh" data-source="post: 4259320" data-attributes="member: 2642">Lots of people in this thread seem to be confusing roleplaying with acting. In fact, everyone who's discussed the subject here seems to be suffering from this to one extent or another, save Mourn. I've had a fair bit to say about this elsewhere, which I repeat below.(Formatting is from the original post (on a different board) except the passage I've coloured, which represents newly added emphasis.)=================Roleplaying, for me, is taking on the viewpoint of a fictional character in the world in which your game takes place. That character may or may not resemble you personality-wise and certainly a lot of the situations in which he or she finds him- or herself will bear little resemblance to any you have encountered. You are playing that role if you make decisions on the basis of what that character would do in that situation, as opposed to the many other reasons you might make such decisions.(Some examples of the latter: what is tactically optimal [though any character without a death-wish will have some concern for this], what seems "cool", what will make for the best story, what you think the DM wants you to do, what you think the DM doesn't want you to do, what will most entertain the group, what will make the quieter players feel included, what will get the current scene over with the soonest. There is a legitimate place for all of these things, but when you do them you're not roleplaying, and all else being equal that is a point against them. It's not always a decisive point against them, though.)Notice what I haven't mentioned, and that's acting out in-character dialogue and so on. That's nice when it's done well, but it's not the same thing as roleplaying. By the above definition, you can roleplay without acting and you can act without roleplaying. The player who has a charisma 8 character but uses his own forceful personality to constantly dominate every scene with dialogue will usually claim he is the main roleplayer in the group. He is wrong. He is doing lots of acting, but virtually no roleplaying. He is making no serious attempt to play the character that's written on his character sheet, or is doing so only when it is convenient for serving some other agenda.Similarly, pressure is often put on more introverted gamers to "roleplay more" when they may, by this definition, already be doing more roleplaying than the more extroverted players doing the admonishing. Having said that, the more overt voice-actor types can be more entertaining to have around. But this is by no means a universal law. Watching someone with no talent for it constantly try their hand at such voice-acting is more painful than stepping on a d4. And being constantly pushed around by the one guy who is good at it is worse still.Roleplaying, so defined, is not the be-all and end-all of gaming. But it's what seperates D&D from DDM, and RPGs from wargames and boardgames more generally. It does not require talking in a funny accent, but it does involve getting into a slightly different mentality than most other sorts of games call for. I think it's a big part of what makes the hobby so rewarding, though there are places (I've listed several in the third paragraph) where doing an end-run around it is jusfified. There is nothing wrong with killing things and taking their stuff, but it's more fun to kill things and take their stuff in a context, and while roleplaying as most people define it may or may not serve that end, roleplaying as defined above is the very thing that makes it possible.</blockquote>

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