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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seebs" data-source="post: 6939313" data-attributes="member: 61529">The passage I quoted doesn't explicitly say "hey, just so someone who comes along 40 years from now doesn't get confused, I want to clarify that I'm talking about the personalities, not just the raw statistics, of these characters".But think about it: If you're just "fulfilling a function" within your group, you are still interacting as Jim, Bob, and Mary who work at the office together. You're just modern people playing a game. The characters don't actually participate in this, and are not the ones interacting; the players are interacting, the characters are just the pawns.The point of that paragraph is to capture the essence of the game, which is "the primary level of interaction is in terms of these fictional persons and their stories, not in terms of the numbers used to do the thing."Okay, I'm not actually understanding your position here.Are you saying that you can't comprehend anything which could ever exist which would be "portraying a character" rather than "fulfilling a function", or are you saying that you can't see why anyone would think that D&D's "role playing" is closer to the former than to the latter?Because you're saying you can't see a difference.Anyway, I have a nice simple example from a recentish game. Epic-level pathfinder. We're fighting epic-level people. One of them has a sword which is probably worth more than everything our party owns put together. And he is a total jerk, and he waits until the last minute, then holds the sword out and offers his surrender to the lawful-good dwarf. The dwarf is really really mad at the guy.Turn comes up...Bill: I take my full round of attacks on his sword.Now, the thing is, Bill's got an adamantine weapon. He will destroy that sword. This will cost us more money than we, as a party, have ever seen all put together. It's worth significantly more than the full-sized magical ship we're capturing. This is an atrociously bad idea in terms of "fulfilling a role within the party". But it is absolutely, unambiguously, in-character and correct for Kal to do that. Bill did it, not because it was a good choice in terms of the party's goals, but because it was what Kal would do.And in the 40+ years I've been playing D&D, outside of your threads on this forum, I've never actually seen anyone use "role-playing" to refer to anything other than "trying to play the character true to their personality and nature".There's no statistic for "would rather destroy several million gold of treasure rather than let some jerk have the satisfaction of being smug about this".</blockquote>

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