Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4720397" data-attributes="member: 32536">You are welcome. That isn't quite what I intended. The important part is expectations, not the name, and these expectations are set up by a lot more than just the name. Things like tradition (people traditionally roleplay in D&D, but not in settlers of Catan), advice and suggestions set up in game texts (Settlers of Catan's manual has nothing but rules, the PHB and DMG are filled with setting and roleplaying advice), and other forms of communication between people who play such games sets up these expectations.Basically, people learn how to play the game from other people who play the game, even if those other people are merely the game creators or random people on an internet forum. The more roleplaying is part of a generally accepted way of playing the game (which it certainly is in RPGs, but not necessarily in other kinds of games), then there is so expectation that people playing the game will roleplay.If you really want to try to wrap your mind around this process, try looking at various games that fall somewhere between RPGs and Chess on the spectrum. In such games, the question of whether roleplaying is generally accepted or not is totally up in the air. MMORPGs are probably the most visible example, where roleplaying may be strongly encouraged and widely practiced in one place, but may be laughed at on a different server in the same game. Single player computer RPGs that let you create your own character, such as Fable or Fallout, also fall in that gray area, though it may be harder to get good information about different ideas of how roleplay in single-player games (and yes, I do believe that roleplaying can exist in a single-player environment).Basically, roleplaying is part of the social side of gaming, so it is governed by social rules, not mechanical rules. Well, I suppose we will just have to disagree. As I said before, different kinds of games may affect the way some kinds of roleplaying are expressed, but I just don't think a set of rules exist that can either encourage someone to roleplay who doesn't want to, or discourage someone who really wants to.</blockquote>

Verification