Hey Community
Simply discussion topic. When you sit down at your table, do you prefer roleplaying or rollplaying? I see pros and cons in both. Both allow for you as a player to make choices, however the internal conflict is mechanical results and quick play versus character vision and detailed stories.
With Roleplaying your character has an innate personality and offers more freedom to express your vision of said character. Gaming becomes about seeing how your characters story evolves. However if your dice rolls don't match your vision you become handicapped and your vision may be soiled. For example lets say you want to make an all-knowing, yet feeble wizard. If you botch all your knowledge checks, but do amazingly well with test of strength your character now looks like a really dopey wizard, with a really good arm. Your vision for your characters appearance has been fundamental changed by the dice. Bit of an extreme example but I'm sure everyone has had something like this happen at one time or another. Roleplaying also allows for detailed stories but that can cause hiccups with other players stories, and the Gm encounter layout.
With Rollplaying your character has the ability to adapt better to the various dice roll results. This also allows for faster play at the table, as well as pick-up play situations. Gaming becomes about the adventure instead. However your character has very little in the "depth" department, as they exist as a means of interacting with the world but aren't completely part of it. Again an example, if you go to pick-up event the most important contribution from your character is their die rolls, not your characters life long dream of becoming part of a certain martial order and their quest to regain their homeland from Orc hordes. With that in mind characters can come across as "The Stealthy Rogue" or "The Twohanded Fighter" or one of my favorites "HEALBOT CLERIC 4000" and never really mean anything.(Still love HEALBOT CLREIC 4000 though)
Both I feel are viable an useful given the situation. But what about preference. Anyone prefer one over the other? Anyone hate one or the other. Any other advantages and disadvantages I may have missed? Any good examples of either? Discuss away :D
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both
I prefer Role play. Combat to me is a form of conflict resolution that I hope can be competed as quick as possible so we can get on with story and role playing. Nothing I hate more than mindless combat for the sake of combat. If it doesn't further the story then leave it out.
I tend to optimize my character to make quick work of combat for this reason.
I prefer rollplay, but it is only engaging if there is a story behind it all to make me care about the dice rolls and the outcome of the combats. So, that means both are important. I just have more fun and get more pumped up about playing out a challenging combat than I do about storytelling.
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I prefer rollplay, but it is only engaging if there is a story behind it all to make me care about the dice rolls and the outcome of the combats. So, that means both are important. I just have more fun and get more pumped up about playing out a challenging combat than I do about storytelling.
I have found that the story tends to get more compelling and interesting the more I work with the GM to make it so.
If I had a gun to my head and had to say which I preferred, roll or role play I would say role play.
But I love combat, I really do.
Both but Roleplay definitely is well ahead of rollplay.
But I think you will find that most people want both, but prefer one side over the other.
Between the two you described? Probably Roll. However, I've never seen why the two are considered mutually exclusive. We play very game-y, but that doesn't mean we can't have character depth as long as people put effort into it, (we have 3 players who do and three who don't, which doesn't really screw with anything).
One of my favorite characters I've made so far is still Sun Xiao, my Lawful Evil Monk who's obsessed with perfecting himself and so on (I think the link to the "Chronicles" is still on my profile, though they're on hiatus ATM because Sun Xiao is temporarily out of the game), and I made him up just because I wanted a character that punched things. That's it, pretty much.
And if your Wizard flubs his Knowledge rolls, so what? What you do then is go off script and actually start playing the role based on the rolls. If your "all-knowing" Wizard keeps failing Knowledge checks, you don't have to change his characterization, you just need to change how others see him. He sees himself as omniscient, whereas the reality is he's terrible at memorizing facts and keeps getting them mixed up. Then he starts passing Strength checks. Cool. Guess he's more of a Battle Wizard then eh? Start working in hints that he was part of a Legion or something.
Or make him like Festus Krex, that's always fun.
I prefer both as well, I think when done right they compliment each other nicely. I have friends who utterly hate rollplay, admittedly they're into the indie rpg scene, not that that's a bad thing. I also have friends whom prefer a good ole fashion dungeon crawl with combat & traps turned up to max. I Gm a lot and personally I love it when my players do both, but in moderation.
Roll playing , never wanted to be a actor. I play games as form of competing and problem solving.
To add to the chorus, it is both. For my tastes, the 'roll' play should support the 'role' play, meaning that the mechanics, character creation and combat the nuts and bolts of the rules in other words all work to help stage the story, world and the PCs. Its kind of like the relationship between techies and performers in theatre really. The techs are behind the scenes making sure things work and what we see on stage is the role-playing world and story. You can't have one without the other.
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Again, both. Without roleplay, it all just becomes an exercise in statistics and probability. Without rollplay, it becomes free form storytelling without the random chance element to outcomes.
That said, I do prefer a slight lean towards roleplay. Character development is, after all, a needed aspect to any story.
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This is a fascinating discussion because at the moment I have a personal stake in it: We have a player who insists on 'roleplay rather than rollplay', but uses that as an excuse to utterly dominate the table; at a table with 6 other players he easily takes 60% of all GM interaction time. If the GM won't give him something, he'll spend 10-15 minutes arguing that he needs it for his 'roleplaying'. In my game, he became very agitated with me for insisting that he pay skill points for skills before being able to 'roleplay' them.
So I will say that I strongly prefer 'roleplay' to 'rollplay' when it is possible, but unless you use the restrictions of 'rollplay', you risk having one player ruining the fun for all the others. The player in question generates huge numbers of complaints from the other players, has caused two GMs two quit rather than continuing to GM him, and has spawned an entirely separate campaign that was created solely to exclude him.
Every game system has the notion of paying for skill points, and then role/rollplaying them. I like letting players buy the skill points, attempt to roleplay them out, and then letting the roll decide the outcome.
Case in point: In another campaign, we have a woman who really is not a very good roleplayer. She admits it herself. Yet she's playing a paladin who maxed out Diplomacy, hence has the highest Diplomacy roll in the party. So when we have a situation requiring Diplomacy, we LET HER TRY. Her soliloquies are awkward. She will never win an Academy Award. But she TRIES, and she's endearing. And then she gets to roll the die, and THAT determines whether or not the NPCs are swayed.
And you know what? She's declared that this is the most fun she's ever had gaming, because we're so encouraging, and because when she has the highest skill roll, we let her try to roleplay it out, even though we have people at the table who could roleplay better than her.
So my vote is:
(1) First pay for the skill points or background.
(2) Next roleplay out the situation.
(3) Finally roll to see the reaction, rather than relying on the player's acting ability (or lack thereof).
Doing otherwise results in the biggest ham in the group dominating all interactions, and nobody shows up at a gaming session to watch one guy ham it up for 6 hours so they get to roll dice for 2 hours of simulated combat.
Ah, that's even easier (the impression I got was this was an ongoing hot/cold streak). Your Wizard was still shaking off a hangover or some nonsense and flubbed his Knowledge checks because he couldn't be bothered to think straight. The Strength checks were just lucky.
Or even simpler, your Wizard had a brain fart and just lost the knowledge on the tip of his brain.
Though I did have a Monk who did that at the beginning of Serpent's Skull. Rolled a 1 on a pretty easy Acrobatics check to jump, fell flat on his ass.
Druid rolls a Nat 20 and does a nice little pirouette as he lands on the boat's deck.
He just wasn't on top of his A game that day.
This is a fascinating discussion because at the moment I have a personal stake in it: We have a player who insists on 'roleplay rather than rollplay', but uses that as an excuse to utterly dominate the table; at a table with 6 other players he easily takes 60% of all GM interaction time. If the GM won't give him something, he'll spend 10-15 minutes arguing that he needs it for his 'roleplaying'. In my game, he became very agitated with me for insisting that he pay skill points for skills before being able to 'roleplay' them.
So I will say that I strongly prefer 'roleplay' to 'rollplay' when it is possible, but unless you use the restrictions of 'rollplay', you risk having one player ruining the fun for all the others. The player in question generates huge numbers of complaints from the other players, has caused two GMs two quit rather than continuing to GM him, and has spawned an entirely separate campaign that was created solely to exclude him.
Every game system has the notion of paying for skill points, and then role/rollplaying them. I like letting players buy the skill points, attempt to roleplay them out, and then letting the roll decide the outcome.
I wish you the best of luck in dealing with this player. They sound like they just suck the oxygen out of the room. This is probably the worst I've ever heard of destructive "Roleplaying," I usually hear about the roleplaying alignment issues. Like I've had people say something like "well my character is chaotic evil, so they're crazy and jump off the balcony and start stabbing guards." This is of an example of I feel bad roleplaying. But it can be pretty destructive.
Case in point: In another campaign, we have a woman who really is not a very good roleplayer. She admits it herself. Yet she's playing a paladin who maxed out Diplomacy, hence has the highest Diplomacy roll in the party. So when we have a situation requiring Diplomacy, we LET HER TRY. Her soliloquies are awkward. She will never win an Academy Award. But she TRIES, and she's endearing. And then she gets to roll the die, and THAT determines whether or not the NPCs are swayed.
And you know what? She's declared that this is the most fun she's ever had gaming, because we're so encouraging, and because when she has the highest skill roll, we let her try to roleplay it out, even though we have people at the table who could roleplay better than her.
This is heartwarming. Proving that once again all that matters is that people are having fun. She's probably having the time of her life.
Role play first, roll play second. I don't see much point in playing RPGs if I put them the other way around. This doesn't mean we act in first-person, necessarily. Sometimes we do and sometimes we describe what we're doing. But the point for me is the rolling and rules are all there to serve as a way to operationalize timing and chances for failure in what we, as our characters, choose to do.
I mostly prefer roleplaying. Though given that usually we all pick some sort of hero or adventurer the role we pick leads enevitably toward rolling.
Both. With a game like Champions you can Roleplay and Rollplay. When you have a character on the first day that lays down a 30d6 Energy Blast it is just plain fun. And then when you come to D&D and get to play a character gets to do all sorts of damage you start asking, "What game was I playing?" :D
On the other hand, I have played a game that was more role playing and I enjoyed getting into character. Any game where I can really get into character I will enjoy the role playing more than the dice. But that doesn't happen often.
Why not both?
Roleplay followed by rollplay, or a few sessions of rollplay then roleplay and down time.
Yep, both. If I had to choose between a session of just combat, or a session of just roleplaying, I'd choose the latter. But combat is a lot of fun, and I'd not be interested in playing a game that had no/very few mechanics with which to "rollplay".
Some, even most of the really great sessions I can remember, hardly a dice was rolled. But without the "gamy" fun and contrast of combat, I reckon it would get pretty old.
Sometimes my players have noticed, wait we didn't fight anything today?
Ha ha, that is why I try to throw in at least one battle even in a social/planning/down-time session.
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A mixture of both with an emphasis on role play. Playing your character is half the fun of the game.
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The question is based on a false dichotomy and is as ridiculous as asking a person whether he would rather have his lungs or his heart working in order.
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Combat is exciting and a good way to make players feel empowered, but it takes up way too much time in comparison to RP scenarios, especially in APs. I rather wish the ratio of that were reversed.
The question is based on a false dichotomy and is as ridiculous as asking a person whether he would rather have his lungs or his heart working in order.
The topic is rather harmless. Again different people prefer different play styles, although the resounding majority prefers both. I know people who treat Rpg's as a purely tactical, wargame-esque exercise. Yet at the same time people across the room are playing something almost completely dice less, involving imagery and acting taking on qualities closer to storytelling. While rollplaying and roleplaying are not mutually exclusive, and do compliment each other, everyone has a preference. Merely wanted to know what others in the community preferred.
The way in which you ask the question contributes to the perpetuation of this nonsensical 'war' which has been raging here and elsewhere. I want to see it as harmless, but I really don't. Or perhaps it is merely a symptom.
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I am in no way trying to start a "war," nor continue one. The discussion has been larger casual with people stating their preferences and why they have them. A few people have even given stories about their experiences. But there has yet to be any hostility. In fact the first person to post anything hostile about the topic, or another persons post is you. Now I'm not attacking you, and please don't feel as such, but you may very well be displacing previous experience with the topic on to the discussion. Now if you don't see any value in the topic, that's perfectly fine, but if no one has drawn battle lines and people are just talking, no reason to jump on in saying "This discussion is meaningless, stop fighting this war." In the same fashion as "Just because there's smoke, doesn't mean there's fire," just because people are talking about a topic that other people are fighting over, doesn't mean they're fighting. I didn't even know people were rage warring over this. I'd much prefer this to be a safe haven for people to express views. Personal preference isn't something that can be wrong, so I don't see much sense in warring over it.
Because I am a numbers guy, I find Roll playing easier. But that does not mean I prefer it. I find I enjoy both. I look for help with my role play from a couple friends who love role playing and I help them witht he numbers at times. In that way we help keep a clean mix of both in our games. When they balance it seems to make the game much better for us.
Power game past encounters to get to the story :)
(I just wish I was better at roleplaying. I think I'm decent.)
I didn't even know people were rage warring over this.
It is called the Stormwind Fallacy. That is has a name coined should tell you everything, but it has been around in the rpg community for a while. There is a reason some of the first replies were 'both'.
What I see as harmful is that by posing the question in the thread like this, and by making people contribute their comments on this, the idea is perpetuated that there it is possible to prefer one over the other, while in reality they have inherently nothing to do with each other. And you can actually tell by the replies that the majority of posters do believe in a schism between these two concepts.
People actually mean different things (even if they don't realize it) when they say 'rollplay versus roleplay', and it has more to do with pet peeves, playstyles and experiences with jerks as players or gms than it has with an imaged tension between rules and playing.
If you pose the question as 'what is your playstyle' you get a much more meaningful discussion, that doesn't focus on "rules vs acting" because it doesn't restrict anyone to either of those choices.
For instance, I find the possibility of modelling any character concept in the ruleset of the world important, and being able to connect the rules with my character in a non-metagame way (I am not a 'fighter'). Furthermore I like structure in the GM story, with less room for GM having to make stuff up on the fly just because the players want to do something outside the box. I want mechanically sound encounter design so that there is an actual tactical challenge in combat.
That answer is not possible given the question. The answer has equal elements of rollplay and roleplay, that contribute to making a better experience. Those concepts are not at odds at all. I do not prefer, and indeed cannot prefer, any of the two because the question is meaningless.
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This also allows for faster play at the table, as well as pick-up play situations. Gaming becomes about the adventure instead. However your character has very little in the "depth" department, as they exist as a means of interacting with the world but aren't completely part of it. Again an example, if you go to pick-up event the most important contribution from your character is their die rolls, not your characters life long dream of becoming part of a certain martial order and their quest to regain their homeland from Orc hordes.
I guess I get into very different games than you.
I play pick-up games all the time (though usually not with a system like PF), but my experience is just the opposite. We create deep and meaningful events in the short time we play, usually directly based on the characters that are being played.
Ex: During character creation, one woman had determined that she came from a long line of educators of warriors. Her family didn't go to the front lines, they were responsible for teaching powerful magics and fighting techniques. Her son had decided that he wanted to join the fight though, but he left before his training was complete and was quickly killed. Wanting to avenge her son, she decided to stop training others and pick up the sword herself.
During play, the BBEG had the ability to bring people back from the dead and they became eternally loyal to him. So of course as part of his entrance to the denouement of the session, he revealed that her son was now to be turned against her. During the course of the battle she was able to free her son, but not just that, he joined her in the fight against the BBEG.
All this happened, without any preparation on my part (I was the GM) in a 4 hour session that included character creation, and 3 other players who all had vivid story lines. We played it at GenCon and I had never met any of the 4 players prior to the session, so I would say it qualifies as a pick-up game.
I'm in the camp of Roleplay (though I love me my miniature battles), but I think it can come in more forms than you give it credit.
This also allows for faster play at the table, as well as pick-up play situations. Gaming becomes about the adventure instead. However your character has very little in the "depth" department, as they exist as a means of interacting with the world but aren't completely part of it. Again an example, if you go to pick-up event the most important contribution from your character is their die rolls, not your characters life long dream of becoming part of a certain martial order and their quest to regain their homeland from Orc hordes.I guess I get into very different games than you.
I play pick-up games all the time (though usually not with a system like PF), but my experience is just the opposite. We create deep and meaningful events in the short time we play, usually directly based on the characters that are being played.
Ex: During character creation, one woman had determined that she came from a long line of educators of warriors. Her family didn't go to the front lines, they were responsible for teaching powerful magics and fighting techniques. Her son had decided that he wanted to join the fight though, but he left before his training was complete and was quickly killed. Wanting to avenge her son, she decided to stop training others and pick up the sword herself.
During play, the BBEG had the ability to bring people back from the dead and they became eternally loyal to him. So of course as part of his entrance to the denouement of the session, he revealed that her son was now to be turned against her. During the course of the battle she was able to free her son, but not just that, he joined her in the fight against the BBEG.
All this happened, without any preparation on my part (I was the GM) in a 4 hour session that included character creation, and 3 other players who all had vivid story lines. We played it at GenCon and I had never met any of the 4 players prior to the session, so I would say it qualifies as a pick-up game.
I have had a very different experience with pick-up games, and I would honestly love to have something like you described. That's pretty darn awesome. My experience has been more of fast moving adventures, but low on the character story. I like the way you handle that, and it certainly make the pick-up game memorable.
Part of it is that it's inherent in how D&D characters are made. I can hand a LG cleric with stats and god picked out to 3 different people and each will RP the character very different.
A game like Dresden Files the character sheet actually tells you something about the characters personality and what they're like. 3 people will still play the character different, but there will be much more similarities than with the D&D cleric.
The advantage of a D&D character is you can explore and find the character during play, but that means in a short one-shot you spend most of your time finding your feet. With a FATE character you make a lot of determinations about personality with game mechanics at creation, but it kind of locks you in at the same time.
Yep, on the LG cleric I am all for alignment just being one piece of the character puzzle. What I am not for is LG just being a greedy looter that cares about no-one or their faith, murder hobo cleric, lol.
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That answer is not possible given the question. The answer has equal elements of rollplay and roleplay, that contribute to making a better experience. Those concepts are not at odds at all. I do not prefer, and indeed cannot prefer, any of the two because the question is meaningless.
Pfft rubbish. It's entirely possible to give a sensical answer to this question, just as it's possible to answer the question, "When you play baseball, do you prefer batting or fielding?" Both are part of the sport, being good at batting has no negative effect on one's ability to field, both are a requisite part of the game, etc etc.
It was an innocently asked question that has received a number of cogent and rational responses. I don't see where the OP ever suggested that they were "at odds" with each other. In fact, the discussion on this thread seems to suggest to me that belief in the Stormwind Fallacy is far less widespread than it used to be.
If it really bothers you, hit the "hide" button and let the rest of us enjoy our discussion.
I prefer both. I have enjoyed entire game sessions with various characters where we barely touched the dice; we let the dice intervene but barely and "rolled" the results into our stories. But there have also been nights where we've all looked at each other and said "let's kill something"; our GM then supplied us with adversaries, initiative was rolled, and a fun time was still had by all. We even role-played throughout the battle. As such, I feel both are necessary and equally valid methods of entertaining ourselves when playing a game such as Pathfinder.
Solid balance of both.
role play. if i wanted to roll play i'd play a video game. i try not to make incompetent characters, but when picking feats, skills and equipment i will always pick flavor over function every time. my characters have very defined personalities and outlooks, and i try to stick as close to that character as possible when playing. the story is the lifeblood of the game. everything else is dressing.
if you're all about roll playing that's fine, but i doubt i'd have as much fun at a table full of min/max'ers who only want to see how many orcs they can mow down before resting/healing.
I prefer.......rhoulleplaying.
Because.......that's hou I rhoulle.......
Both definitely