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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5812819" data-attributes="member: 42582">Obviously that's your prerogative. Equally, though, I don't buy your attempt to assimilate "roleplaying" - as a description of what we do in RPGs - to what strikes me as a particular style of first-person-heavy, GM-force heavy play which I regard as only one approach to RPGing, and (except with certain systems and certain GMs) not always a very rewarding approach. I don't disupte that this is different from rolling dice. It doesn't both me whether or not you want to call it a system. It seems to me obvious that it's a process of some sort for resolving questions about the content of the shared fiction of the game, and to me "system" seems as good a word as any (and the traditional one, in our hobby) for describing such a process.I don't at all agree that it is inherently more immersive, either as a GM - where at least on occasion, it can be very third person as I weigh up in my mind a range of considerations about the beliefs of one party, the charisma of another, and so on - or as a player, where with a GM whose conception of the situation is very different from mine the experience can be quite jarring and radically undermine my own understanding of my PC and the situation in which my PC is located.This seems to me to relate to what I posted upthread about the way a particular group uses the procedures of play to engage the fiction. If a given system doesn't engage the fiction in sufficient detail, then that is a reason to choose a better system!The actual example you give strikes me as problematic not because of the lack of roleplaying, but because of the lack of fiction. What is actually going on in the shared fictional space? And it seems to me that, if in a game that sort of thing is routine - ie players not being interested in, and not caring to engage, the fiction, then the problem isn't the resolution system but rather a mismatch between the fiction the GM is creating (via framing scenes/situations/encounters) and the situations the players are interested in.Alternatively, it may be that the mechanics themselves are crappy, and get in the way of the fiction or actually encourage it to drop out. It sounds like you might be describing a 3E game, and I don't really have a very good handle on how 3E's procedures are meant to be used.Of course, there is only a finite number of systems available, and I'm not denying that your "free roleplaying" approach (what I am calling your "process" or "system) may be the best for you. In my personal experience, I often get richer and more salient detail using systems which redistribute some of the power away from the GM and onto the players, using the dice as an element of that - particularly when there are conflicts of interest between the PCs and the NPCs. As a general rule I use free roleplaying only when there are no such conflicts. The amount of first person (or third person) characterisation doesn't change signficantly from one approach to the other, in my experience.My personal view is that the distinction has its origins in the mismatch between the systems available and widely played in the 80s, and the sort of RPG experiences that people wanted to have. I think it particularly derives from people wanting to play character-immersive games using Gygaxian dungeon crawl mechanics.And from the fact that there is a difference between freeform resolution and dice rolling resolution - which there obviously is - it doesn't follw that the distinction revolves around immersion in one's character.I don't agree with this at all, and I'm not sure what mechanical systems you have in mind when you assert it. If what you say is true of 3E's social mechanics that just suggests to me that they're bad mechanics.It's certainly not true of 4e's skill challenge mechanics, for example, or of BW action resolution based on intent and task.Again, in my view if your resolution system means that when you engage your system you are no longer playing your character, then you need to get a better system!Well, here are some actual play reports that involved <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/309950-actual-play-my-first-social-only-session.html" target="_blank">mostly heavy system</a> (<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/312367-actual-play-another-combat-free-session-intra-party-dyanmics.html" target="_blank">and another one</a>) and <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/313724-actual-play-pcs-successfully-negotiated-kas.html" target="_blank">mostly free roleplaying</a> - the rationale for the different treatments being primarily the one described above, of presence or absence of conflicts of interest. I'm pretty happy with where my social resolution is at at the moment, and with the way that die-based mechanical systems factor into it.</blockquote>

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