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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4718734" data-attributes="member: 32536">To answer these questions...I don't think that the difference between D&D and Settlers of Catan in how much people roleplay is a mechanical difference exactly. There is a difference in how much people roleplay in those games, but it doesn't have a lot to do with the limitations or mechanical options in either. Rather, I think it has a lot to do with the expectations of people going in to the games. People go into D&D to roleplay while they play the game, and people typically don't go into Settlers of Catan expecting to roleplay. In this regard, you might say that the act of creating a character for D&D might be considered a mechanical incentive to roleplay, since it puts you in the mindset of playing a role (your character), but that might be the extent of it.As for chess and such... for some reason a minor scene in C. S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader comes to mind, where mouse knight Reepicheep keeps losing at chess because he is too busy replaying grand stories of valorous knights to remember to try to win. You don't see roleplaying in chess because, well, it gets in the way of winning, and chess is an extremely structured and competitive game with clear good and bad moves (clear to skilled players, that is, not necessarily clear to me <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). I think there is a certain point where, if roleplaying and winning directly conflict, winning will almost always be put at a higher priority. That said, I don't think this applies very much to any RPG I have ever seen, because such games almost always allow numerous choices that are all equally valid routes to victory (unless you have a stingy railroading DM, which is fortunately rare).Put simply, there are factors that affect how much people roleplay, but they come up in the comparison of RPGs to other forms of entertainment far more than in comparisons between different RPGs.</blockquote>

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