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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
What is the "role" in roleplaying
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<blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6934838" data-attributes="member: 5100"><p>Maybe part of the confusion is that I only see two words: "roleplay" and "game". You aren't "playing a role", you're "roleplaying". It's a mighty fine hair to split, but it seems that it may be important to the conversation. My actual preferred spelling is "roleplaying" (like it is on the back of the PHB <u>and in the poll question</u>), not "role-playing" (as Gygax often wrote it) or "role playing". I sometimes use one of the other spellings due to differences in spell-checkers and red squigglies.</p><p></p><p>Regardless of how it's spelled, it's a single unit. The combination of the words carries a slightly different meaning that each on its own. To roleplay is to pretend to be another person. It implies getting inside the head of the fictional person and making decisions based on that person's goals. </p><p></p><p>When I play a Fighter character, I'm not "playing the role" of a Fighter. I'm roleplaying a character who happens to be a Fighter, in addition to his other characteristics. If he plays the functional role of "meat shield", it's because his personality drives him to do so.</p><p></p><p>A gaming group or individual player can go through the character creation process starting with a personality and then deciding what functional niche the character plays or they can start with the function and build a personality around it. The personality can be deep and intricately constructed or it can be shallow, relying on cliches and genre archetypes. Likewise, the functional niche can be broad (I'm a Fighter) or highly optimized for certain sub-functions. I've done both, and it doesn't matter. What matters is that the character is a fictional persona and you are roleplaying the persona and that's what makes it a roleplaying game instead of a minis quest game like HeroQuest or Arcadia Quest.</p><p></p><p>As a note, no one is saying that PCs don't fill a functional role. The <u>player</u> is roleplaying the persona. The persona is filling a functional niche.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mercule, post: 6934838, member: 5100"] Maybe part of the confusion is that I only see two words: "roleplay" and "game". You aren't "playing a role", you're "roleplaying". It's a mighty fine hair to split, but it seems that it may be important to the conversation. My actual preferred spelling is "roleplaying" (like it is on the back of the PHB [U]and in the poll question[/U]), not "role-playing" (as Gygax often wrote it) or "role playing". I sometimes use one of the other spellings due to differences in spell-checkers and red squigglies. Regardless of how it's spelled, it's a single unit. The combination of the words carries a slightly different meaning that each on its own. To roleplay is to pretend to be another person. It implies getting inside the head of the fictional person and making decisions based on that person's goals. When I play a Fighter character, I'm not "playing the role" of a Fighter. I'm roleplaying a character who happens to be a Fighter, in addition to his other characteristics. If he plays the functional role of "meat shield", it's because his personality drives him to do so. A gaming group or individual player can go through the character creation process starting with a personality and then deciding what functional niche the character plays or they can start with the function and build a personality around it. The personality can be deep and intricately constructed or it can be shallow, relying on cliches and genre archetypes. Likewise, the functional niche can be broad (I'm a Fighter) or highly optimized for certain sub-functions. I've done both, and it doesn't matter. What matters is that the character is a fictional persona and you are roleplaying the persona and that's what makes it a roleplaying game instead of a minis quest game like HeroQuest or Arcadia Quest. As a note, no one is saying that PCs don't fill a functional role. The [U]player[/U] is roleplaying the persona. The persona is filling a functional niche. [/QUOTE]
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