What ever happened to "role playing?"

[S'mon]

How does the new system encourage going beyond "I bluff the guard."?

D&D has a fairly tactical combat system that has seen some fairly extensive play testing over the years. As for the social skills, IMHO they seem to be less well thought out, less well play tested, less complete, and less comprehensive than everyone is making them to seem.

If the GM plays it that roleplaying a convincing Bluff and saying "I Bluff the guard" have the same chance of success, he is actively discouraging roleplay - because as has been said, roleplay takes effort. "I Bluff the guard" is quicker and easier (like the Dark Side) and if not discouraged will, in my experience, come to dominate.

I agree that the social skills are nowhere near as complete or thought-out as the combat skills - but I've seen posts from takyris quoting the DM advice in d20 Modern which indicates to me that (most of) the Designers' intended a workable & fairly sensible interaction-skill system - workable _in conjunction with roleplaying_ - not necessarily Shakespearian or even in-character, but roleplaying at least to the extent of "I go up to guard and tell him I'm the Thungian representative on an important diplomatic mission" or even just "Your shoelaces are undone!"

 

[S'mon]

Here's how I play social skills in my game. I am CERTAIN you'll find some flaw or problem with it, so please keep it to yourself - it works fine for my group of ROLEPLAYERS!!! and it's much the same as we did it in 2nd Edition too (minus the clear cut skills). A player is interacting with an NPC. Depending on the interaction we might not roll dice at all (routine interaction). However, if there is any doubt about how it would go (convincing a guard to let you past when he's under orders not to let anyone past) then the player will roleplay out how he attempts to get past the guard. After this is done, he will roll the appropriate skill (Bluff/Diplomancy/Initimidate, whatever) and I will adjust the DC depending on the roleplaying (maybe he said just the right thing to make the guard trust him).

This is exactly how I do it (agreement w Icebear! Yaaay!).

I may also require multiple rolls in complex encounters.

 

[S'mon]

As for being elitist, I've seen experienced role-players players fall prey to just saying in the new system "I bluff the guard." It's these people that I'm concerned about, and I think that somehow the rules of the game or how they are written have encouraged GMs and players to think this way. They won't do this in some other systems, but there is something about d20 that makes them think this is OK.

Yup - like I said, this happened to me & my lot.

In 1e & 2e it simply WASN'T POSSIBLE to say "I Bluff the guard" and have any hope of success. If you wanted to do more than kill things, you HAD to roleplay. 3e has removed that requirement.

 

[S'mon]

A GM who ignores every attempt of yours to roleplay and doesn't let circumstances affect dice rolls is not good...

We seem to have a lot of not-good GMs on this thread then, takyris.

 

[Phosphoros]

In 1e & 2e it simply WASN'T POSSIBLE to say "I Bluff the guard" and have any hope of success. If you wanted to do more than kill things, you HAD to roleplay. 3e has removed that requirement.

I see your point in your posts but I have to respectfully disagree to a point about the game itself being the problem. Books don't think. They simply give you the devices to use. I believe it's very much up to the DM to encourage roleplay. If it's players he know to be roleplayers and they seem to be slipping. Time to put your foot down and see what the problem is.
I guess I've DMed to long and maybe it's a little like babysitting, but I've learned that if players can get away with something by doing nothing they will regardless of the rules.
A simple exchange could be the difference in role playing and not.

DM - Ok you're at the guard. His face is obscured by his helmet but you can assume he's in a bad mood from standing out here all day. It looks as if they are letting no one in as people are being turned away en masse.
What do you want to do?
PC - I'll bluff the guard to get in.
(it could stop here and everyone roles or the DM could do one simple thing)
DM - Convince me, then we'll make our rolls.

Maybe I've simplified it to much but it's what I do and I get some very lively and fun game sessions.

Phosphoros

 

[takyris]

A GM who ignores every attempt of yours to roleplay and doesn't let circumstances affect dice rolls is not good...

We seem to have a lot of not-good GMs on this thread then, takyris.

I doubt that. There's an enormous difference between "let circumstances affect dice rolls" and "let circumstances affect dice rolls exactly the way the player wants". The player doesn't know what kind of training the guard at the bridge has had. The player doesn't know that the guard has been reprimanded by his superiors for letting obviously okay people through without verifying their papers. The player doesn't know the the guard has got to go to the bathroom, but his buddy isn't back from a long break, leaving him stuck with a full bladder on duty, so anybody who takes a long drink from the canteen in front of him is going to get hurried along desperately.

So if the player roleplays that he's acting like a snotty young officer who insists that the guard doesn't need to see his papers, the player has unfortunately and unwittingly walked into a circumstance penalty on the bluff, even if it was roleplayed very well. If he'd bluffed being an absentminded personal guard for somebody inside and been really apologetic about forgetting his papers while taking big drinks from a canteen, he'd have had a bonus. Maybe a Gather Information check would have gotten some information that could have given the player a hint about what kind of bluff to use, or maybe those are, simply put, da breaks.

As somebody who has, in real life, said something extremely clever, only to have other people not appreciate it because of circumstances beyond my control or ability to know about, I can verify that it doesn't always go the way you want it to go. I'm hearing a lot of "The DM doesn't let my roleplaying affect the game at all", but without those DMs here to tell their side of the story, we've got nothing. Maybe the DM was being a jerk. Maybe the DM was trying to get the party into a certain room before the end of the session, and the player was hogging the limelight. Maybe the DM had written circumstances into the target that made such a check more difficult, or more difficult to modify through the method that the player chose. We don't know.

I know for a fact that I've had to look a player in the eye and say, "Out of character, I completely believe that you've said something logical and good, and I personally have no really logical way to disagree with you. In character, the guard sneers and says, 'Keep dancing, pally-boy. You still don't get in without papers.'" I'd given him a bonus on the check, but he'd still blown it by a really wide margin. Not much you can do about that. I could have let him win anyway, but then what does that tell the guy on the other couch with the high-Cha, high-skills character? That I'm going to fudge dice rolls to make the actors happy, even if the actors are playing rangers with Charismas of 11 and no skills?

(side thought: Maybe this ties into another source of deep disagreement -- DMs fudging dice rolls or successes/failures. My group has some good roleplayers in it, but everyone is a good tactician and computer geek, and after doing it a few times, I've been informed in no uncertain terms that while the party doesn't want to be put in unwinnable situations, the party also doesn't want me to fudge rolls to keep them alive. I've been in other groups where this wasn't seen as a problem, because the important thing was telling the story. Maybe there's a tactical/roleplaying element to the fudge/no-fudge inclination, because, to a tactical person, the roleplayer's argument sounds a great deal like a request-to-fudge -- which many (most?) tactical players don't like.)

EDIT: I'd like to rescind an earlier thought. It's not the GM's job to promote roleplaying. It's the job of the other players in the group. If a player wants to spend ten minutes roleplaying, in-voice, an encounter with the serving wench, that's ten minutes that I spend talking with that player and nobody else. If two players want to spend ten minutes talking with each other in character, though, they can have a really fun roleplaying session while other people make non-roleplayed checks (like Gather Information, which takes a few hours, or non-roleplay-worthy equipment purchases) and I listen, help other players, and get the next line of monster stats ready. In all this talk of roleplaying, let's try to bear in mind that roleplaying can also exist, in equally valid form, as player-to-player interaction, and that it doesn't require complete DM resources in that case, either.

Not saying that players should never try to roleplay when interacting with NPCs. Just a note that we shouldn't forget that the entire group is responsible for encouraging roleplaying. It isn't one noble (or heartless) DM and a bunch of helpless (or apathetic) players. It's a collaborative effort.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

..."let circumstances affect dice rolls exactly the way the player wants".

But who's saying this? I've kept up with this thread since the beginning, and the only time something this rediculous comes up, it's coming from the "rules are just fine as they are" camp. Which, consequently, makes it hard to feel like this thread is gaining any progress in regards to mutual understanding.

 

[hong]

I gotta say, I love it when someone resorts to name calling. I'd also like to take this time to say that being called an "elitist" bugs me about as much as being called "greedy" bothers Donald Trump.

The fact that you went to the trouble of mentioning it, when you were not the target of the name-calling in the first place, indicates that it does, in fact, bother you. Rather too much, actually.

In other words, I've earned it.

... on the other hand, if you insist, Bendy.

 

[hong]

Yup - like I said, this happened to me & my lot.

In 1e & 2e it simply WASN'T POSSIBLE to say "I Bluff the guard" and have any hope of success. If you wanted to do more than kill things, you HAD to roleplay. 3e has removed that requirement.

GOOD. You know what? I do things exactly as you describe (give some in-game detail, then make the roll). I don't need a ruleset to hold my hand. I can do just fine putting my own character-interaction meat on the bones of the abstract framework that is the rules.


Hong "MORE ELITIST THAN BENDY NOULG" Ooi

 

[S'mon]

But who's saying this? I've kept up with this thread since the beginning, and the only time something this rediculous comes up, it's coming from the "rules are just fine as they are" camp. Which, consequently, makes it hard to feel like this thread is gaining any progress in regards to mutual understanding.

Bendris - after reading lots of good stuff by takyris in support of the rules & explaining how they're actually meant to work (eg on a recent thread about using the Bluff & Diplomacy skills) I think your best point was your earlier one that it's not the d20 mechanics per se that are at fault, rather an attitude that 3e seems to encourage - perhaps by the way the 3e books are written - that actual roleplay is ancillary & unnecessary to the playing & enjoyment of a "roleplaying game". This may be because many WoTC employees prefer card games & skirmish wargaming to roleplaying. It may be an inverse snobbery directed at World of Darkness-playing "role-wimp" elitists who sneer at D&D simply for being D&D (and I bow to no man in my despite towards that lot!). It may be a pragmatic marketing decision that downplaying the roleplaying element of RPGs is the way to sell more PHBs to the videogame generation.

I don't know what it is. There does seem to be something there, though.