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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1546300" data-attributes="member: 5171">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.</blockquote>

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