And again I ask if you REALLY brought the same expectations into each game. The same playstyle. The same level of RPing etc. For example..did you bring in the same expectation of how much time you'd spend hacking s@@! up in Shadowrun as you did in 4e?
Yeah, I'm afraid so. (Although we're talking rollplaying more broadly than just combat, aren't we? I mean there may have been less fights in shadowrun than OD&D, but we had the same mix of mechanical resolution versus pure roleplaying in each).
Not that we're very good at learning rules anyhow, so maybe that's part of the reason system is not very significant to us. I'm very much an advocate of "when in doubt, roll and shout" rather than looking up what the rules say.
Presumably, you hold the same view about Pathfinder - PF tends to attract more rollplayers than VtM does and VtM tends to attract more roleplayersAnd I wouldn't say PF is super rollplay, I think I already quantified my opinion on it as a 4-5 on a 1-10 scale between 1 being roll and 10 being role (5.5 is ofc the median).
But moreso than VtM right? I was just suggesting you could make the same argument as your OP without bringing 4E into it if you wanted to avoid the usual distractions (plus its more likely to be a game people here know well, I presume).
lol if you guys aren't even reading through the books that much and learning the game fully then you're not really getting the full flavor and spirit of the game though are you?
Maybe. I think I read and understand the rules, I just regard all RPG rules as optional. After our first grapple in 3.5 we abandoned the RAW pretty quick and went back to ability checks.
I'm not criticizing your playstyle because I do this as well, but I'm trying to make a point I mean if I played DnD for 10 years then barely skimmed the VtM book just to build the character and learn the combat system I think it would be expected that I'd pretty much play the VtM game just like I did DnD unless people at the table tried to explain to me otherwise.
I clearly gave the wrong impression. I do much more than skim the rules - we just don't particularly care about putting them into practise.
We don't "default to DnD" (role master is actually the game we've played most). We don't really default to anything other than "how we play". That's kind of been my point from the start. Your anecdotal experience is very different from mine - neither of us is going to do well extrapolating from our own game to make claims about RPGs in general.
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Okay, then I definitely don't understand what you're saying. Luckily, I predicted that, so I win points anyway. :)
I thought you were saying that playing a different system would tend to alter one's play style. (I disagree with that).
Now it seems to me you are saying that someone who plays with a casual approach to the rules is quite likely to just play them all the same. Is that right? (I agree with this).
My central point is that we have no idea what the relative proportions of "system chameleons" vs "I do it my way" gamers are.
No worries. I still don't understand, but to be clear - I read rules very thoroughly, I just often choose to ignore them when I'm running an actual game (so ironically I know the rules of games I haven't played better than those I have).
I don't seem to have fully articulated what I mean by "playing casually". Suffice it to say, I still disagree with your OP, but don't pretend to be any more likely to be right.
On another topic, I find it strange that some people are experiencing more powergaming with less mechanics than the reverse. Were these people already powergamers who continued their M.O. or people that became MORE "powergamey" when the rules lessened? Were they not really powergamers and then became "powergamey" when you switched to a lower mechanic system? I'd like to hear more specifics.
It seemed to me a couple played D&D and vowed never going back as it restricted their 'freedom'...
Others were new player...who figured this is how the game is played.
It is a mix.
How players develope into as you call them rollplayers vs roleplayers is a interesting topic. I do agree with you that the system may play a minor part in this. But usualy from people I have talked about on this subject it is usualy more based on their past experience, especialy their first experience.
If a new player joins a role-playing heavy group...if they enjoy it...they weill tend to be a role-play heavy player. If they don't enjoy it they might seek a more rollplay group...and vice a versa. And this is not unchangeable as later experiences may swing them one way or another.
So to me this question is really not about the system...but who you play with.
I agree with the base principle, but I think it is worth noting that neither 4E, nor pathfinder actually do have robust systems for encouraging strong characters.
Wraith: The Oblivion for instance included two core systems, upon which your characters very survival depended, which existed to embed your character in the world. Passions and fetters.
You had to pursue your passions to regain one of you resources.
If you did not protect your fetters, horrible things happened to your character.
This on top of the universal willpower return mechanism from all oWOD games.
Now, Neither 4e nor pathfinder go out of their way to prevent non-combat related character development, but it is pretty laughable to say they do anything to support it, in the way that the indie scene and some WW books do and did.
While I don't neccessarily disagree with you...it depends on how invested you are into the world...if you are not your character growth will be stunted...for instances everytime I look at VtM and the clans I feel like I am being put into a strait jacket.
Also I can find things like you enjoy about Waith to be more...of a strait jacket in character growth...I really perfer not to have mechanics dealing with character background and growth...to me that should be up to the player.
I just feel more free in say PF than I do than say VtM. Though I don't mind playing those systems and can enjoy a game...if I care about the backstory and the mechanics are not too intrusive.
you can play a non-clanned person in VtM.
I was kinda of hoping you would reply to the post above that one.
Anyway...yes you can...and you are treated as a inferior by the rest of the clans I believe...it has been awhile since I last looked at the game. I do know their are penalties involved.
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It is a chicken and egg thing for me.
If you start from a concept and work to make that concept the most powerful version of that concept you can, I am ok with it.
If you start from trying to manipulate the system and then create a concept to reflect that manipulation, I'm not ok with it.
I think every character who adventures wants to be powerful, and will trying to learn things to be powerful.
I also think if you change the concept every other level to fit some crunch you found, you risk killing the verisimiltude for everyone else at tables where that matters to the other people playing.
But this thread isn't really about VtM. VtM was used as an example of one book format vs. another (4e)
Sure...though VtM is not a one book format...but lets stay on topic.
Your theory is that the type of system( rules heavy vs rules light system) is the determination (or atleast a big impact) on if you are what you cal a rollplayer vs roleplayer. Correct?
I think your ignoring what is a bigger impact on this. Personaly who you play with is alot more of a important influence than the system. Especialy your first experience.
For instance if a first time player joined my game regardless of system would more likely to become a Role-player...if they had fun...if they did not than they would probably seek out more rollplayer type of groups.
Like wise if a first time player joined a rollplayer heavy rules light system group...they will more likely become a rollplayer than a roleplayer.
To sum it up RPGs are never about the system..or rarely about the system...but who you play with.
How your group plays has more of an effect on you than the system they use.
Thank you for summing up what I said in a sentence. I can get sometimes a little long 'winded'.
Sorry. Bad habit of mine. Brevity is the soul of wit, they say.
Nothing to apologize for I was sincere in my thanks.
I think I've said this multiple times. The system doesn't "make" someone a rollplayer or roleplayer. It tends to moves people toward a certain direction.
And I am saying Who you play with is much more important in moving people towards a certain direction.
The way the player is and his group is separate from this. You come to a table with a certain "roleplay" make up and the group you're in obviously has a significant impact on the "roleplayness" of the people..but after that the game they choose will very likely have an impact in pushing toward one direction or the other.
From my personal experience this is very untrue. I have played lots of different systems...not one of them has pushed any direction from Role-playing or not. And almost every gamer I know who do play multiple systems are pretty much the same way.
Now if you feel pushed by a system...that is a 'you' problem not the System.
I wonder how big Tempest Stormwind's head is? His goofy lil' post has become fodder for RPG arguments and linked like it's a Law for a bunch of years now.
I think I read somewhere that he said he regretting naming it after himself, which he had done tongue-in-cheek. He points out that it is really just a specific example of the false dilemma fallacy and that is what people should be calling it. It is just that it became really popular and you can't really put the genie back in the bottle.
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My only real problem is that we call it the Stormwind (whom I believe I remember from the WoTC boards) Fallacy. Well, you call it that. I don't.
This fallacy already HAS a name. It's a simple correlation fallacy.
"Stormwind Fallacy" has always sounded pretentious to me. Sounds like gamers trying to sound important over a silly argument whose conclusion is just a matter of common sense. (No offense, Stormwind, wherever you are.)
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Requests for this thread:
*Please read people's full post carefully so you can respond to what they're actually trying to say. Threads get cluttered with pages of people going back and forth devolving the thread into: "I like chocolate" "Why do you hate caramel so much?" "You caramel lovers are all suppressing every other candy. Just like Hitler". Pay attention to people's qualifiers like "some", "maybe", "a few", "it's possible that" etc. so you can see how far they're going in their argument. If you think you know what someone is saying, but aren't sure ask instead of accusing them of something outlandish (unless its obvious you're just joking)
*Please only post things related to the thread that [you think] add something interesting to the conversation.
*Please keep personal remarks about others at a level low enough that it doesn't draw the attention of admins who delete posts like its going out of style. That got the last thread locked.
Before I roll up my sleeves and dive in, I'd like to say thank you for making an initial post with such a reasonable tone, and asking for others to follow suit.
Whether they'll play along....? Well, it's likely some of them won't, but at least you did your bit to keep things civil.
I especially like the quoted part; far too often, these threads get polarised, and a person can't make a statement that is generally true, without someone rebutting it with one instance of rare anecdotal evidence, expecting that makes the entire argument invalid.
Can I also ask that people consider the context, whenever they see the term 'you' (as in 'when you have a PC with no backstory...', or 'when all you do is kill things and take their stuff...'), and ask themselves if it's actually being used to single out an individual, or being used in a general sense, before they take offence and blow their top?
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Taking it to the extreme, when we played Amber Diceless, where the mechanics are almost completely transparent to the player, we had some of the most intense roleplaying I've ever been involved in. Consistently at levels I've only seen in the peaks of other games. That was in several different games with different, but overlapping groups.
I don't know if 'transparent' is quite the right word for the Amber mechanics. 'Invisible' seems to fit better.
Or even deliberately ‘obscured’.Sure, in the session immediately after the initial character-building auction, everyone is aware of who has top ranking in the various categories, but that's no different from a PF group putting their heads together, and knowing their Fighter has 20 Str, 7 Int, the Wizard has 20 Int, 7 Str, and another guy has a bunch of 14s.
They don't necessarily know what anyone spent their unused auction points on (has he traded the purity of his bloodline up or down, paid for Trump affinity, sorcerous powers, bonded gear, or just hoarded it for stupidly high lucky breaks, and/or to blow on something big later?).
Once they've got their first actual awards, everything's up in the air.
It's assumed anyone with top ranking in the four main stats will keep adding to keep their alpha status, but it's not a given. If everyone thinks it's not worth trying to keep up, they could stay top dog at no expense at all (risky, and inadvisable, but possible, if you're investing heavily elsewhere).
You don’t know how many points you were awarded, you don’t know if you improved in anything without trial and error, if you didn’t have enough to jump a ranking, you don’t spend the points at all (and go to the next priority on your list), and even when you can prove you improved, you still don’t know if you caught up with your rival PC, because the GM is allowed to seed your generation with any number of half-siblings and cousins you never even met. You don’t even know if you spent any points at all (you’d be rocking a large pool of ‘Good Stuff’ hero points, but completely unaware of that fact).
Get a couple of sessions under your belt, and no-one knows anyone else’s stats, even their own.
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If a player is heavy into mechanics and spends 2 hours working on his character to figure it out to 18th level and find all the little rules and options and strategies to optimize his character for max abilities is it likely that he's also that roleplay heavy to spend another 2 hours working on his backstory and personality and such? I doubt it.
I believe this is why you are still getting grief from the Stormwind camp. What you are describing above is not a dilemma, because none of that mechanical twiddling interferes with roleplay.
Firstly, just because a player spends time looking for the 'perfect' fit of feats, traits, skills, doesn't mean they're picking those building blocks on the basis of "ULTIMATE POWWWWAAAAARRR!".
They could be motivated by purely aesthetic concerns, even to the point of building an under-powered PC.
There are now hundreds of weak feats, underwhelming traits, and lacklustre archetypes which trade down/trade away all the best abilities of a class for nothing in return (see my rant against the First World Summoner, for a prime example).
Conversely, the iconic D&D3.x ‘CODzilla’ cleric has been given a few speed bumps, but is still almost business as usual, and anyone can make one, using a no-brainer build from the core rules.
If you allow yourself to be prejudiced against players, for the time they spent looking through the rules, you’d be elevating the creator of ‘Father Growbig Smashalot’ onto a pedestal, holding him up to the others as the example to follow, for his multifaceted Oscar-worthy portrayal of ‘a man who likes to grow large and hit things’; and making snipey coments at the creator of ‘That guy who gets several irrelevant bonuses to social skills when dealing with the penniless fishermen of Bogmarsh’, for powergaming, when the player spent every effort tying his PC to the setting, and making his PC mechanically worse.
Secondly, roleplay is how a PC is played, during the game.
Backstory is not roleplay, and can even be a hindrance to playing a living, breathing PC, when it becomes a straightjacket to the owning player, other players and GM.
It can be useful in moderation, and provide the GM with extra hooks to insert into the campaign, but this is done on the understanding that the player will meet the GM halfway.
If I reveal the Prime Minister to be a six-fingered man, then I bloody well expect that our ‘Inigo Montoya’ will go freaking a!!@$&#, and lay into him. I do not want to hear “Oh, no, my six-fingered nemesis is ten years younger than this man, and a ginger. I will calmly sup tea with the Minister, and make small talk, avoiding any actions which may put me in an awkward situation, or drive the action forward in any way.”
When someone brings a binder of backstory, often with huge assumptions about the campaign setting, which have not been approved by the GM, it implies the player has zero interest in interacting with the events in-game, and is planning on hijacking every session to revolve around them, and their search for their Princess Magical Mary Sue McGuffin.
Forcing everyone else to stop playing, while you tell them a monologue, is also not roleplaying.
See also “Why caaaan’t I play a Kender? I could have fallen through a wormhole! Pleeeease! I’ve practiced the voice and everything!”.
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I want to underscore the 'cheese' comments above. This is key. A given person is likely to have different points of view on a given character choice. Particularly depending on whether or not it belongs to them or someone else.
For example, I detest 'dipping' during builds. I feel it combines the worst of multi classing with the worst of design imbalance.
That said, if it made enough sense to the character concept then I might be okay with it.
Depends on the backstage how it gets ran in play.
I'm not really sure what the point of this thread is.
Is it to say that people have certain preferences? rollplaying, roleplaying, some of both, lots of both, none of both
You might look up the GNS theory. I some people have dismissed it, but it maybe what you are interested in.
Ok. Yeah, we get that.
Is it that some games tend to make some play style preferences more "natural" than others?
Ok, I can buy that.
So I have to ask, so what? What is it this thread is suppose to be about?
Is it just to try to get people to stop shutting someone down for saying, "PF/D&D/whatever makes people more likely to rollplay than roleplay"?
Tabletop rpgs are a hobby, a past time we engage in for fun. If a group of people like to crunch numbers and work on making powerful characters, but the whole group including the GM is on the same page, why is that wrong? Why is another group that likes to be more like improvisational theater somehow morally superior? "Roleplay not rollplay" implies that one is better than the other.
I think not only is the Stormwind Fallacy a good point but you also have to consider how casual or serious the group is. I know some people who don't roleplay heavily or optimize, because the game is just a fun thing to do one night a week. Then there are people who really get into the game, and both optimize and roleplay. I honestly think both are fine.
You know what really makes me, as a player, roleplay more? The GM and the adventure. I had a GM who made us all have back stories for our characters, but then he just ran fights in caves. Never did a lot of talking in character there. On the other hand, one person in our group is running Skull and Shackles. There are a lot of NPCs, and dealing with them rather than monster fights to get things accomplished, so our characters have shown more personality than in the first group. It's not the system, it's the GM.
THIS is exactly what I would like to see from PF, and it relates to things I said earlier.
Kudos Paizo.
I'll agree with you there...bit I think for different reasons.
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One problem I often see is D&D gamers who expect the game to be it all, like if D&D was the only RPG in existence and therefore it must accommodate all styles of play meet gamers who believe that D&D is the ultimate optimization vehicle.
D&D is a hack'n'slash game. And that's not because of 3E's baroque rules system, it's not because of what Paizo did (contrary to what 3.5 Elementalist keeps going on about) it's because How Gary And Dave Did Things. This is a game about killing things, taking their stuff and getting your XP up. Sure, you can have some grrrreat RP'ing while at it, but you must be aware that, at its' very core, it's still a hackfest across some bizarre 1E dungeon.
There are RPG systems, even entire cultures, that grew up in opposition to that. Where mechanics interleave with storytelling, combat is downplayed, character advancement is more granular, and so on.
Can you play D&D with a healthly mix of tactical wargame meets RPG? Sure! I try to. Can you play D&D as a board game? Yeah, especially if it's 4E :P Can you play D&D as pure thespian experience divorced from the whole killing stuff part...likely...but that won't be D&D, really.
And here we have folks who never ventured outside D&D (heck, some Paizo staffers have stated that they have experience with just a handful of RPGs outside D&D), and sometimes they expect it to be the ultimate RPG experience. The notion of D&D being more of a tactical wargame and less of a storytelling experience riles those folks up.
The problem is, however, amplified by the fact that as far as "RPGs where you can twink your toon into wazoo" go, in optimization circles 3E is considered a (flawed, imperfect, Monte/Skip/Tweet are lobotomised monkeys, yada yada) pinnacle of design and no other RPG rules system comes close in terms of how much control and power it offers to the player. As a result, there is a fair amount of "I play D&D to win" people who get a kick out of D&D because it allows them to trivialize encounters in 2 rounds thanks to their combo of class A, feat B, spell C. They tend to discuss next to nothing apart from optimization (hi Streamofthesky!) and get the "I came here for roleplay" crowd fired up and vice versa.
I think a more likely scenario that the Stormwind fallacy is that all players fall somewhere on the spectrum of roleplaying, and they fall somewhere on a completely different spectrum of rollplaying. These two spectra are not overlapping in any way, and some players fall really high on one, and low on the other, creating the fallacy in the first place, but then there are players who fall high on both (a group that has been discussed in great length) and players who fall low on both (and get discussed a lot too, but in very different kinds of threads).
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One problem I often see is D&D gamers who expect the game to be it all, like if D&D was the only RPG in existence and therefore it must accommodate all styles of play...
I see this too, from GMs trying to shoehorn the game into genres it was never intended to fit.
See the many threads from GMs using Lovecraftian elements, unhappy that their players' superduperhero PCs aren't reacting 'properly' to Mythos creatures, ie. in ways that a geriatric, arthritic New England librarian might be expected to do."They shouted a challenge, threw on some buff spells, and CHARGED the monster! Why aren't they playing right? They're RUINING everything!"
D&D is a hack'n'slash game. And that's not because of 3E's baroque rules system,
And there are many who would say, "If it isn't baroque, don't fix it!".
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They tend to discuss next to nothing apart from optimization (hi Streamofthesky!) and get the "I came here for roleplay" crowd fired up and vice versa.
A disproportionately heavy focus on rules and optimization is inevitable on a discussion board because
1) There is no "wrong" way to role play there are plenty of wrong rules interpretations. The rules are very complicated. The stealth raw vs rai, stacking different bonuses, diagonal insanity, etc can line up opposing views and drag out into a 500 page argument. "How many foster homes should my half elf have grown up in?" or "should i be a happy go lucky half elf or a dark brooding half elf?" merit the same response: however many you want. Your characters personality and background are entirely subjective: whatever you want the answer to be is the right answer.
2) Its easier to show an optimization or a combo than good role playing on a discussion board. While role playing can be influenced by a 20 page background story, it primarily takes place at the table. Your tone of voice, body language, and the exact interplay between you and the dm/other players get lost in the text.
3) Inspiration for characters is all around us. Books, comics, cartoons, manga, plays, history, legends, and movies are all places you can go to get an idea of "what should my character BE? If you want to know "how do i capture______'s essence of cool for my character" those are all places to look. If you want to know "how do I make ____ work mechanically... you need to come here.