Norade wrote:It comes down to, don't play something you suck at playing. If you have the tactical skills of a retarded housefly, no amount of good stats and dice luck will allow you to dominate combat, that is unless you build something so retarded that you might as well say I win. If you suck ass at talking, maybe try an easier role until you get the hang of it and branch out from there. Just because you can roll a die doesn't mean you should.
Actually, it can. There are, and should be, builds for the epic warrior who doesn't need nor want any tactic more advanced than "run out there and chop them all to death." It's a risky proposition, but if he's capable of doing it you shouldn't call him retarded for pulling it off.
Again, you're missing the point. Role-playing, playing a character, does
not necessarily require that you amateur method-act everything the character says. Many people
do prefer that, but when it comes down social contest resolution, that invalidates social character builds since it's almost always the case that the GM ignores the die roll unless it's hilariously bad and just has the decision based on whether he thinks the player was convincing or not.
This is
unfairly penalizing to the guy who chooses to sink character resources into "resolving situations by talking." It is, in fact, directly analogous to making the guy with the fighter pull out a sword and beat up somebody who will be fighting back with it.
Now,
can you stunt that way, if you say, have a player who is skilled with a sword and uses a prop to demonstrate what exactly he's doing?
Sure, you can, but
that should be what informs the dice rolls, not the other way 'round. If a guy uses a retard argument but he's so amazingly charismatic that people lap it up, as befits the die roll, then the retard argument should work! If, on the other hand, he uses a brilliant argument but his character couldn't talk his way out of a parking meter ticket with coins in hand and the meter expired for less than a minute, as befitting a craptastic dice roll with a lot of penalties, then that, too, should inform the argument by giving him a bonus which will be swallowed up by the mountains of his character's social inability, not define the argument, and the brilliant argument should fail.
If you ask any gamer the best sessions are often the ones that are well described and draw the players in with nary a die roll to be seen. My favorite session ever was the first level heroes of horror game where the PC's ran from ghost sounds and a pot being moved by mage hand. They were so into it they ignored the fact that they could have won in straight combat and stayed in character the entire session. Had they rolled a die versus fear I would have ended the game right there, packed up, and left and these are long time friends I was playing with.
I find that unlikely. I also find it bizzare, since the situation clearly wasn't one where supernatural fear was being inflicted, so why in the world should they have had to roll a die Vs. fear?
Unless, of course, it was an Exalted like system, in which case a player who thinks the situation is spooky and creepy and isn't entirely sure how his character would react would be within his rights to say "Hm. Gonna roll Valor and see just how weirded-out my character is," and let that push his actions.
In fact, I did that a fortnight or so ago, Saturday before last. Modern Exalted was the setting, my character had been informally asked by an FBI agent acquaintance to check out a yacht owned by a bunch of mobsters. Sneaking on board from the gangplank was more or less impossible given the Charms I had so I had to leap across from the next Yacht over, only to find out the place is lousy with mobsters on the party deck. I want to get below and search for evidence, so I come up with the idea of climbing to the top deck and slipping down the stairs from behind, only to find the top deck has another guard up there as well. At this point, the situation looks realistically impossible for a stealth entry barring outright invisibility (a feat beyond my character's means,) and a reasonable person might give up, but my character is one of the Night Caste of the Solar Exalted, and he has Valor 3. An impossible infiltration is the kind of thing he might take as a
challenge - but also the kind of thing he might back down from. I know this since he was me, and I was firmly ambivalent as regards the situation.
So I rolled my Valor die, deciding that anything above a two (equal to or greater to my Valor score) would be a "go for it," 2 or less would be "Leave and report on the situation." Came up 4, so I stunted out an incredible ballsy display of testecular fortitude in climbing through the window in the span of a few moments,
right behind the guard on top. Jaws dropped, ST said that the balls that took and the Stunt bonus canceled out the huge bonus he should get for noticing a guy climbing in behind him, so it came down to opposed Stealth Vs. Awareness. I rolled crap, invoked my Third Stealth Excellency, rolled even worse crap, kept my first crap roll, the guy rolled his Awareness. And tied my crap roll. It came down to opposed Essence rolls, him vs. me. He had E2, I had E3. He rolled a ten and an eight, scoring three successes on two dice. I rolled two tens and a four.
As the ST put it, "and the group may now exhale." Die rolling was involved, and it was tense, and it was Awesome. Awesome that you never would have seen because you would've fucked off down the local the moment I said I was going to let a die decide if I was suffering from an excess of competitiveness and continued in the obviously foolhardy infiltration attempt when I could've legged it with very valuable intelligence gathered just from being able to see the party.
If you have issues with players getting out of character or meta gaming slap the player with an exp penalty or have him roll a new character. Don't make them roll dice to see if he remembered his mittens, helmet, and name tag. Sounds like you just hang out with a group of like minded retards who wouldn't know in character if they got insulted by it.
Nobody is advocating making people roll to see if they remembered to bring their gear.
I
am advocating letting them roll to see if they convince someone of something contentious, rather than demanding that they convince
me, as stand-in for the NPC, of it, with their real-life social skills. Here's how I see this working.
Example a:
Bad social skills player, Glorious Elf Rocker-Bard PC. "I, um... I want the king to let us, uh... You know, take his, uh... Stock, of, uh... Err.. S... You know! His, um... Supplies! For the trip." "Supplies?" "Y-You know... Magic stuff?" "Oh! You want him to let you loot his royal armory of the rare magical items within in order to aid you on your quest?" "Y-Yeah, exactly." "Roll it. He's very disinclined to let you run off with his magical stuff, but give it a go. DC 34, no bonuses or penalties."
*Roll: 10 + 25 = 35 Vs. DC 34.*
"The king agrees with your argument that sending you on a quest ill-prepared means he is damaging your chances of accomplishing the quest he has set you upon. Though he vows dire vengeance should you cross him by taking his things and running, he swears you all to oath (non-magical) and lets you have your pick of the royal armory. You're advised not to take anything but what you can actually use."
Example B:
Great social skills player, good method actor, Dire Orc Barbarian PC. "GM, I'm going to address the king." "Okay. Go for it." "My Liege! You set us forth on a nigh-impossible errand, so precarious in nature that you have lost three of your own champions on the quest! You know our reputation, you know we shall not fail and we shall not falter, but you ask us to do this without any assistance whatsoever! If you demand your lands to be freed of this menace once and for all, it would behoove you to gird us in the finest armour available to you and arm us with your stoutest arms before we set off, for as you can surely see, your means are far beyond ours!"
*GM impressed.* "Wow. +5 bonus for a logical and impassioned argument that plays to his motivations, but you're still asking him to hand adventurers their reward before they set out. DC 25. Roll it." (Yes, he not only awarded a bonus of +5, but lowered the DC. This kind of thing really will happen, when an ST is asked to eyeball an off-the-cuff DC for something, he'll arbitrarily set it based on the player's description. This amounts to a bonus of +19 over what the other guy had - hardly beans.)
*Roll: 10 - 4 + 9 = 15 vs. DC 25.*
"The King is infuriated by your insinuation that he has set before you an overly difficult task, embarrassed by your bringing up the topic of his dead champions, and made wrathful by your rightly calling him out in front of his court on him setting this quest before you with no assistance. Also, he doesn't like your smell. He leans forward off his throne, and the courtiers gasp. In a raspy voice, he says, "You believe you should have some assistance beforehand on this matter of petty extermination,
Orc?" There's real venom in his voice when he calls you orc. He snatches the coin-purse from the belt of the vizier next to him, and throws it down at your feet, assorted gold and silver coins with the odd copper, a rare platinum or gem, spilling out over the floor of the throne room. In total it amounts to about 650 GP, but you'll have to get down on your hands and knees to collect it - no doubt by the king's design. "There is your
assistance, orc. Take it and be gone, you'll get no more until you bring me the head of the criminal I've sent you after!"
And you seem to be arguing for the reverse; that the guy with great real-life speaking should pretty much run shod-rough over social situations because he can talk rings around you despite the fact that his character is about as appealing and good at arguing as a pile of llama shit, the GM, but the guy whose character is supposed to be a great social lubricant winds up being about as effective a social lubricant as melted sugar is a sexual one.
You will note, by the way, I didn't take the liberty of "inserting" stumbles, fumbles, language problems,
Inappropriate loud and immediate vulgar insulting of the King or what-have-you. I took what he said exactly as he said it, the way he said it, because that's the way his barbarian speaks, by his choosing, and I'm fine with that. But, owing to his woefully insufficient roll, despite my absolutely gelding the difficulty of the situation for him thanks to that amazing argument of his, he still manages to rub the king raw by pressing the wrong buttons and he faces the problem of discrimination owing to being large, green, smelly and spiky, which in all results in him getting a modicum of his request (assistance,) but it comes in the form of such a backhanded insult that he's probably going to (at best) turn his back coldly and leave, if not actually get the situation worse by saying something back to the King.
Stark wrote:I have no idea how 'use mechanics to make RP situations informative and fun' somehow means I'm saying you shouldn't use dice. Maybe it's rude, but you're pretty ignorant if you think my example of Pendragon doesn't use dice; indeed what is the point of all those 'character' numbers if you don't roll them? The mechanics can just HELP rather than REPLACE the roleplaying; something so complex some RPers literally can't understand.
Oh sorry, I'm 'missing the point'.
You
are missing the point. The mechanics are the situation-resolution method, not the method-acting. The role-playing can and should HELP the rollplaying. I'll freely award bonuses, even in systems (like d20) that don't codify bonuses like that, for excellent and awesome descriptions of what you're doing in a fight, or good, immediate in-character talking as part of influencing negotiations,
But the roleplaying should not give you a free pass to bypass the rollplaying. You still have to roll your dice and take your chances when something matters (tying your shoes or not tripping as you walk into a pub doesn't matter, tying your shoes whilst hanging from a cliff to keep the magical boots that someone tried to disarm from you on your feet matters. Not tripping as you're battling over lava on a precarious perch matters. Epic shoe-tying or balance-keeping stunts can and will get you bonuses to those feats, but in the end it still comes down to a die roll.)
Like Norade says, all kinds of ROLE PLAYING doesn't need to involve dice; systems that provide the player with stats to inform character actions (ie courage, honesty, whatever) and a feedback method to change these values through trial means everyone role plays to role play because the role playing makes the role play in role.
Better than 'I rolled fear +2 chaotic sight, I'm cool'.
wtf did you just say? Did you just have a breakdown of linguistic communications? I think you just botched a Charisma + Linguistics roll!
It's essential to maintaining ambience, unlike such unimportant aspects as "setting" and "names" and all that garbage.