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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bendris Noulg" data-source="post: 1542544" data-attributes="member: 6398">See, this is an over-exageration of the arguement, though. In regards to role-play, it would indeed be a mistake to reward for ability. Ability comes with practice and application. What is missing from a lot of people, however, is the attempt to role-play. For instance, I played with a guy that grew up on the west-side of Chicago, and there was absolutely no way to get him to drop his accent or to stop using slang. However, he attempted to express what his character was saying and doing. This is far more preferible to "I bluff the guard" because "I bluff the guard" doesn't give me squat to work with. It's dry. It's mechanical. It's so boaring I can't express how lame it is without the censors masking out half of my words. I'll take a poor role-player that tries any day of the week over someone that hides behind game mechanics to avoid it. I agree that this is wrong. Any "real role-player" should, I would think (that is to say, if your Charisma is 6, then role-play the 6, otherwise you're just a different breed of munchkin). Now, this is a point that comes up again and again, and I'd like to adress it to a degree. We have Flag Football. Flag Football is for people that want to play Football without getting hurt. However, this doesn't change the fact that "real" Football involves really big men smacking each other around. We have T-Ball. T-Ball is for people that can't hit or throw. However, this doesn't change the fact that "real" Baseball involves chubby guys taking whacks at a regulation-sized ball that is thrown by the pitcher. In short, while I'm all for providing a crutch for those that don't or can't otherwise role-play, I see no reason to loose sight of the fact that it is a crutch. And that's the problem I have with many of the counter-arguements in support of these crutches. It presents a lower bar as the norm rather than motivating people to achieve the higher bar, and that's never a good thing. Rather than having everyone "aiming high", we instead have end up with a bunch of people on crutches that think they're good gamers. Well, I'm not one to give a +2 for "good role-playing", although I'm one to not allow the roll to occur until some extent of role-playing has occured. And I think that's the point here: The purpose of a role-playing game is to role-play. The fact that a person can choose to not role-play at all and (per the rules) get just as far as those that do role-play isn't a matter of rewarding or not rewarding for doing something that is enjoyed; it's a matter of making a role-playing game into something in which role-play is completely irrelevant. And in my book, that isn't a role-playing game at all.</blockquote>

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