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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 2842838" data-attributes="member: 18549">Ah, yes...what Richard Dawkins calls "the argument from personal incredulity".  Otherwise known as "I can't imagine it, therefore neither can anyone."  When will this line of argument die?Can we get a new message tag for this board, to go with General, WotC, Humour, etc.?  The tag can read "badfun" and so everyone will know ahead of time that the thread is just another half-baked "role play vs. roll play" thread, so they can ignore it.Also, kudos to everyone who points out the myriad flaws in the OP's position, notably the bit about the tautology, which is another line of argumentation that's been around since the Sophists, and also shows no sign of impending expiration.Now that I'm done editorializing, allow me to contribute: When I play characters (I'm usually the DM), I generally pick a concept that makes me excited about playing in character.  Recent ideas were:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Whisper gnome warlock</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Really bastardly grey elf bigot wizard</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Kobold dragon disciple</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Incredibly humble and submissive fighter who is also a surprisingly ruthless murder machine</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Spoiled brat noble girl educated in the arts of warfare and magic (i.e. spellsword) so that she can someday lead the duchy, who sneaks out one night to track down the bard that she had a one-night stand with on her seventeenth birthday because she wants to be an "adventurer" like in all the stories he told her and who gets a rude awakening when she's almost raped and killed by a group of orcs but is saved at the last minute by a cleric of Hextor who finds that kind of behaviour "distasteful", which leads the girl to have an identity crisis, flirt with evil, and eventually redeem herself, becoming an adult along the way.</li> </ul>After I've got the concept, I work out the mechanical perspective as best I can, because I want to avoid death.  Sometimes, this isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world (whisper gnome warlock is not exactly the most munchkinized character concept I can think of).  But I attempt to make the most effective character I can that fits my concept.  Why?  Because there's no reason not to.  First and foremost, D&D is a game of tactical combat.  It always has been, and it always will be.  D&D has always been "beer & pretzels improv night" as a secondary draw.  If you really wanted to play a role-playing game that focused on the role-playing to the exclusion of tactical combat, you'd play something else; there's plenty to choose from that would suit that desire more aptly.Given that the OP persists in playing D&D, or games like it, suggests that he might enjoy some tactical combat once or twice a session.  If that's the case, there is only one sensible path of action: make characters that are good at tactical combat, within the limits of their character concepts.  To do otherwise is to shoot one's self in the foot unnecessarily.  Now, I'm not trying to say that the OP himself discourages making decent tactical combat characters.  Specifically, he's fed up with the really weird characters because he thinks they exist entirely for mechanical maximization (they don't).  But since the argument is related, I thought I'd make a generalized rebuttal, to the effect of: just because my character is good at killing things doesn't make me any less of a role-player.Perhaps I should add that line to my signature, to remind people of how ridiculous it sounds when people suggest that there is an incommensurable divide between character concept and mechanical execution, as though this were a zero-sum game in which adding to one meant taking away from the other.  This "role-playing vs. roll-playing" shtick is a tirade that's been around since the earliest days of role-playing games, and over the years we've tried to banish it to the nether realms whence it came, but it always returns.  Sometimes it comes in a slightly different form, like this thread, but at the bottom it's the same.  Some guy doesn't like the way other people enjoy themselves, and goes online (or in the old days, to the letters page of Dragon) to try to get someone to justify his ire by agreeing with him.  Every other week or so it sneaks onto these pages.  From the look of it, it appears on RPG.net every single day.  I think The Forge was designed specifically to house the argument, to protect the rest of the internet from its baleful presence, but it managed to slip out of its cage there to menace the rest of us.For the logic people: "Ah, then you're not a true Briton!"</blockquote>

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