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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1544701" data-attributes="member: 5171">Side note: I just realized what was really bugging me here. There's no differentiation being made, in many of the "D&D is just rollplaying" arguments, between "roleplay" and "success".  Most of the complaints I'm hearing boil down to "my character couldn't win without having the scores to do that social stuff, and that's not fair".  And that's what really grates on me.  1) As soon as you make roleplaying about winning, about gaining levels and furthering the plot and getting more stuff, you're cheapening it -- and the people in the group who would roleplay will find their voices drowned out by every mediocre roleplayer in the group shouting, "I'm feeling angst right now!" in hellish unison, often while wearing a black T-shirt with an ankh prominently displayed.2) I haven't heard anything about people roleplaying a low-charisma character and running into any trouble with it.  I mean, you guys want roleplaying to matter more, right?  C'mon, I'm sure somebody made Charisma their dump-stat once or twice.  My group currently has two Cha10 and one Cha8 person, and they just love saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  The Cha10 guys are clueless and direct, respectively, and the Cha8 guy is just incredibly abrasive.  We play point-buy.  Everyone chose these ability scores for themselves.  They're having a great time.  They don't expect to win by social skill rolls, because they didn't put the points there -- and they give each other grief in-character, set each other up for hilariously socially inept one-liners, and enjoy themselves a ton.  The face-man in the group is the one who wins with social skill rolls, but that certainly doesn't mean that nobody else is roleplaying.  If that's not happening in your group, then, well... your group has gotten into the habit of doing nothing except that which leads as quickly as possible to victory, with no side-trips for roleplaying along the way.  Your group would, by that definition, be a bunch of rollplayers.  Sucks etre vous.3) Social skills should be required in order to win, even with roleplaying.  Just like you wouldn't let a 3rd-level wizard cast Meteor Swarm because he roleplayed it really well, you shouldn't automatically give somebody the keys to the castle just because their Cha10, no-social-skills character made a good point with the royal seneschal.  To do otherwise is essentially to cheat. To confuse roleplaying with victory is to completely misunderstand what roleplaying is, and to pervert one of the most important parts of the game.</blockquote>

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