What computer game(s) would you love to see made PnP?

[Norade]

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.

Really, you can build a warrior who runs out and chops things to death... Holy shit I never knew that! Not!

If a player wanted to play a highly skilled field officer for the king, but had no idea what a flank was let alone how to exploit one, should I have him roll for every action or should I perhaps let him know that another class might be more rewarding than letting the dice play for him? The same goes for any class people want to play, if they can't talk I'll let them know that perhaps talking isn't going to be the most rewarding. Otherwise we get the melee only warrior standing on a boat a good 100 feet away from some orcs trying to intimidate them by shouting and waving his sword...

You also fail to notice that swinging a sword =/= talking. Very few people swing a sword for a living anymore, yet nearly everybody has to interact socially each day no matter where they happen to work and thus get to practice social skills. Not to mention that get within melee range, roll to see if you hit is a bit less involved than giving a great speech or the fact that if a character rolls high on his give oratory skill, but his player fails at describing either the DM needs to work fast and make a good speech or the game falls flat as suddenly it ends missing what should be a key scene because the dice skipped it.

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?

You clearly can't read or understand even simple shit so let me spell it out. In a normal game, the players, when faced with this encounter might have ran, in this instance they stayed in character and on mood for the game and fled, if we were dealing with a guy so socially retarded that he stutters and doesn't know the word for supplies then he ruins the game no matter how many dice he does or doesn't roll and in this case he ruins it worse if he rolls a d20 to figure out how to behave in character. Turns out playing with retards ruins games...

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.

So in short you couldn't decide how the character played, designed, and motivated by yourself should act so you copped out and rolled some dice to see what he should do. The rest would have followed the exact same either way, except that you wouldn't have looked like an idiot.

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.

Holy fuck, way to miss a retard joke. Please head to the locker to your left and grab your helmet, mittens, and name tag, don't forget to hold onto the rope once you leave the facility with the rest of the group.

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.

The point is, if a player who is smart isn't able to play his low intellect character well, no amount of dice rolling will make it any less jarring. The same goes for a total moron playing a character with genius level intellect and doing it poorly. Yes you can mitigate it by applying modifiers, but they still ruin immersion and make for a shitty game and a poor group. Your examples show that a good DM could salvage that, but the campaign will always be more difficult to run with players playing characters they

[Simon_Jester]

Dammit. I hate it when this happens.

Here I am thinking "Wow. ShadowDragon actually has a bit of a point," and knowing he's liable to mess it up horribly when other people interpreting it uncharitably and he gets sucked into defending a retarded extremist version of his own argument. Again.

Anyway, here's what I think. There should be significant coupling between quality of roleplay and the effort required by a dice roll, but not enough to make it effectively impossible to play characters who are better at persuasive speaking than you are.

Let's take ShadowDragon's example, modified, to illustrate what I mean.

PCs want to get an advance from the king in the form of magic items, in order to launch a dangerous quest.

Example A:
Inarticulate player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player A: [Stammers out his goal, but does not present an argument.]
DM: "OK, sounds like a DC 35 skill check." (in real life nigh-impossible, but this legendarily persuasive character actually has a 50/50 chance of pulling it off)
Player A: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM, to quote SD: "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."

Now, here the DM's mistake was making the difficulty of the skill check too easy; he gave Player A's crappy argument a 50% chance of success when by all rights it shouldn't have one. He should have forced Player A to refine his argument or forced Player A to accept a penalty for not having one, reducing the character's chance of success to something lower. Player A can do better than that, if nothing else by presenting the outline of a good argument even if he couldn't actually write one.

But even then, there has to be a limit, and this is where ShadowDragon has a point. In this situation in real life, a normal person would fail to persuade the king; a sub-normal person would probably offend the king and get himself killed. A sub-normal player should not get the same result for his charismatic character as he would for himself, because otherwise he's effectively barred from ever playing charismatic characters at all.

I know a woman who stammers and gropes for words; I would let her play a charismatic character even knowing that she can't impersonate charisma. So in this situation, I would not apply a penalty for the (moderately bad but not horrible) argument by the player that made it impossible for the charismatic character to succeed- merely difficult.

Poor roleplaying should elicit penalties, but not crippling ones- just ones good enough to act as an incentive to better performance.

Example B: (new)
Ordinary player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check

Player B: "I want to convince the king to give us some magic weapons to fight the monster."
DM: "Good luck. How do you plan to do that?"
Player B: "Hmm." [Thinks for a minute.] "I argue that the magic weapons will improve our chances of success, making them a good investment."
DM: [thinks] "You're banking on your reputation here- expecting him to count on you to not take the money and run and to actually win the fight. Then again, you guys have a decent reputation in both those departments, so... it could work. Roll a DC 35 skill check."
Player B: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM: "You just barely pulled it off. But the king threatens you- if you take the goods and run he will hunt you down. If any of it is damaged or lost, it comes out of your pay. Oh, and [grins] he wants you guys to give him something as collateral..."

This is essentially the same outcome that ShadowDragon gave his PC in Example A. And this time it's fair, because Player B put some honest effort into it. He's not a persuasive speaker, but he can at least explain what he wants and why. That "and why" is important, because it's the best an average human being is likely to be able to do in this kind of situation. The average human being should not be penalized as a player for having merely average ability.

Example C: (new)
Eloquent player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player C: [States goal and presents structure of argument, along with pretty damn good speech explaining it.]
DM: "Nice. Roll a DC 35 diplomacy check with a +5 bonus."

Player C just roleplayed his (eloquent) character convincingly, and the argument he presented gives him a good chance of success in real life; it's as good as could be expected. He gets a bonus for it, with his 50/50 chance of success improved to 75/25. And that's fair.

Example D:
Eloquent player, undiplomatic character (like in ShadowDragon's Example B)

Player D does what happened in SD's Example B, with the orc barbarian giving a good persuasive speech.

Now there's a problem. In real life that's a good speech that has a good chance of success. But is the speech good roleplaying? I'm not so sure. That orc barbarian isn't supposed to be a persuasive speaker- there's nothing about him that makes him good at diplomacy, or at sweet-talking kings into giving him an advance. On the one hand, you could give him a bonus for his speech. On the other hand, that speech was out of character.

If you DO give him a bonus sufficient to give him any real chance to succeed, you make it pointless for an ordinary player (such as Player B) to even bother building characters with mechanical features that enhance persuasiveness. Those features become useless, because suddenly the orc barbarian with shitty charisma and a wonderfully eloquent player is just as good at convincing the king to do things as the highly charismatic bard whose player is merely average.

And here, too, ShadowDragon has a point. Letting the dice rule everything is bad in roleplay, but so is outright removing them (and the mechanical rules) entirely. Because without mechanics, there's no way for players to pretend to be capable of feats that they can't perform in real life. Nor is there any way to force players to accept that their character isn't perfect, because the ability to describe my orc doing anything means that my orc can do anything, even things that my stated background for him and rule-based simulation of him should never allow him to do.

I know there are systems that work like that, but I prefer not to follow them to that extreme. At some point, a character's built in mechanical weaknesses (including social and intellectual ones that a player can cover with roleplay) have to really limit that character. So I think that at best, the orc should get a bonus that makes it possible, barely so, to succeed... but at considerable risk; if the orc rolls poorly the king may be offended! Because he's not supposed to be the brilliant diplomat; making him the best one to do that steals someone else's opportunity in the spotlight.

[Norade]

Example A:
Inarticulate player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player A: [Stammers out his goal, but does not present an argument.]
DM: "OK, sounds like a DC 35 skill check." (in real life nigh-impossible, but this legendarily persuasive character actually has a 50/50 chance of pulling it off)
Player A: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM, to quote SD: "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."

Now, here the DM's mistake was making the difficulty of the skill check too easy; he gave Player A's crappy argument a 50% chance of success when by all rights it shouldn't have one. He should have forced Player A to refine his argument or forced Player A to accept a penalty for not having one, reducing the character's chance of success to something lower. Player A can do better than that, if nothing else by presenting the outline of a good argument even if he couldn't actually write one.

But even then, there has to be a limit, and this is where ShadowDragon has a point. In this situation in real life, a normal person would fail to persuade the king; a sub-normal person would probably offend the king and get himself killed. A sub-normal player should not get the same result for his charismatic character as he would for himself, because otherwise he's effectively barred from ever playing charismatic characters at all.

I know a woman who stammers and gropes for words; I would let her play a charismatic character even knowing that she can't impersonate charisma. So in this situation, I would not apply a penalty for the (moderately bad but not horrible) argument by the player that made it impossible for the charismatic character to succeed- merely difficult.

Poor roleplaying should elicit penalties, but not crippling ones- just ones good enough to act as an incentive to better performance.

I disagree here rather strongly because it's no fun for either a DM or the other players to have to listen to somebody do an extremely bad portrayal of their character in an important situation. It destroys everybody's suspension of disbelief to have that sort of thing happen. You can save it with dice, or the aid of other characters, but I've found the truly terrible often resent the help and feel belittled by it.

My preferred way to deal with this is to try and ensure each player picks a character they can play. Is it fair that not everybody can play what they want? No, but life isn't fair. Does it make for a more enjoyable game overall to have players able to RP their chosen characters effectively? Yes, and with work everybody still gets to have fun.

Example B: (new)
Ordinary player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check

Player B: "I want to convince the king to give us some magic weapons to fight the monster."
DM: "Good luck. How do you plan to do that?"
Player B: "Hmm." [Thinks for a minute.] "I argue that the magic weapons will improve our chances of success, making them a good investment."
DM: [thinks] "You're banking on your reputation here- expecting him to count on you to not take the money and run and to actually win the fight. Then again, you guys have a decent reputation in both those departments, so... it could work. Roll a DC 35 skill check."
Player B: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM: "You just barely pulled it off. But the king threatens you- if you take the goods and run he will hunt you down. If any of it is damaged or lost, it comes out of your pay. Oh, and [grins] he wants you guys to give him something as collateral..."

This is essentially the same outcome that ShadowDragon gave his PC in Example A. And this time it's fair, because Player B put some honest effort into it. He's not a persuasive speaker, but he can at least explain what he wants and why. That "and why" is important, because it's the best an average human being is likely to be able to do in this kind of situation. The average human being should not be penalized as a player for having merely average ability.

Average is far easier to deal with than vastly below average, usually with a bit of DM prompting from the King's aid to spit it out already, you can get an average player to do a commendable job portraying his character, even if it is with more heart than skill. You can also have the players who are better at talking but aren't playing especially great talkers step up and lend a hand under the rules most games have for aiding another. In the end such a scene still ends up working with help from others and the DM. Sometimes that scene ends up a bit flat, but its far and away better than the first example.

Example C: (new)
Eloquent player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player C: [States goal and presents structure of argument, along with pretty damn good speech explaining it.]
DM: "Nice. Roll a DC 35 diplomacy check with a +5 bonus."

Player C just roleplayed his (eloquent) character convincingly, and the argument he presented gives him a good chance of success in real life; it's as good as could be expected. He gets a bonus for it, with his 50/50 chance of success improved to 75/25. And that's fair.

These are the players every DM covets when they're one they can really set a scene and so long as they don't try to hog the spotlight other players often don't mind taking a step back to let them really shine from time to time. It's especially nice when they play a character that allows them to come through.

Example D:
Eloquent player, undiplomatic character (like in ShadowDragon's Example B)

Player D does what happened in SD's Example B, with the orc barbarian giving a good persuasive speech.

Now there's a problem. In real life that's a good speech that has a good chance of success. But is the speech good roleplaying? I'm not so sure. That orc barbarian isn't supposed to be a persuasive speaker- there's nothing about him that makes him good at diplomacy, or at sweet-talking kings into giving him an advance. On the one hand, you could give him a bonus for his speech. On the other hand, that speech was out of character.

If you DO give him a bonus sufficient to give him any real chance to succeed, you make it pointless for an ordinary player (such as Player B) to even bother building characters with mechanical features that enhance persuasiveness. Those features become useless, because suddenly the orc barbarian with shitty charisma and a wonderfully eloquent player is just as good at convincing the king to do things as the highly charismatic bard whose player is merely average.

And here, too, ShadowDragon has a point. Letting the dice rule everything is bad in roleplay, but so is outright removing them (and the mechanical rules) entirely. Because without mechanics, there's no way for players to pretend to be capable of feats that they can't perform in real life. Nor is there any way to force players to accept that their character isn't perfect, because the ability to describe my orc doing anything means that my orc can do anything, even things that my stated background for him and rule-based simulation of him should never allow him to do.

I know there are systems that work like that, but I prefer not to follow them to that extreme. At some point, a character's built in mechanical weaknesses (including social and intellectual ones that a player can cover with roleplay) have to really limit that character. So I think that at best, the orc should get a bonus that makes it possible, barely so, to succeed... but at considerable risk; if the orc rolls poorly the king may be offended! Because he's not supposed to be the brilliant diplomat; making him the best one to do that steals someone else's opportunity in the spotlight.

These tend to be the worst players, they have the skill to stay in character and when they don't it can really break the game, even worse than the poor player would. The good is that if reminded most players will step back and let the party talker work even if he might be less skilled. If the player isn't as cooperative then it can lead to issues. I've been lucky enough to avoid these situations so far by keeping some players from some campaigns where they don't fit in.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Really, you can build a warrior who runs out and chops things to death... Holy shit I never knew that! Not!

If a player wanted to play a highly skilled field officer for the king, but had no idea what a flank was let alone how to exploit one, should I have him roll for every action or should I perhaps let him know that another class might be more rewarding than letting the dice play for him? The same goes for any class people want to play, if they can't talk I'll let them know that perhaps talking isn't going to be the most rewarding. Otherwise we get the melee only warrior standing on a boat a good 100 feet away from some orcs trying to intimidate them by shouting and waving his sword...

That's what's called "Knowledge (Tactics)." You don't make a PC memorize his character's spell book to know what spells he's capable of memorizing in the morning, do you? In this instance, if you had a character who's a supposedly legendary tactician whose player is on the verge of making a legendarily boneheaded mistake out of a lack of understanding, as the GM it is your responsibility to make sure the player has access to all the knowledge available to the character. If, in this situation, the PC is overlooking the obvious tactic of flanking, just remind him "you know, there's a bonus for catching bad guys between you and an ally." If it's something more obscure like how archers could benefit from a height advantage but would benefit more from being able to attack from concealment, then it would behoove you to call for him to make a Knowledge (Tactics) roll with a DC commensurate with the complexity of the tactic.

Or, as the player, he can always call for the roll in order to draw upon his character's skills to make a suggestion, at which point you should inform him of what occurs to his character upon ponder the situation.

As for intimidating orcs armed only with a sword from a boat 25 squares from shore, that would be a Cha + Intimidation roll (or whatever skill it's called and comes under in the game you're playing. In Exalted it would be Cha + Presence (Intimdiation).) Frankly, if the guy is such a legendary badass with a sword, the orcs could go from "he's over there, what an idiot," to "holy shit, there's only a puddle between us and him! Run away, before he rows over here!"

You also fail to notice that swinging a sword =/= talking. Very few people swing a sword for a living anymore, yet nearly everybody has to interact socially each day no matter where they happen to work and thus get to practice social skills. Not to mention that get within melee range, roll to see if you hit is a bit less involved than giving a great speech or the fact that if a character rolls high on his give oratory skill, but his player fails at describing either the DM needs to work fast and make a good speech or the game falls flat as suddenly it ends missing what should be a key scene because the dice skipped it.

And this is all a colossal red herring. It doesn't fucking matter that swinging a sword and convincing someone who doesn't agree automatically with you are different things, the point is that there's still a conflict, and we have rules for that conflict's resolution. It's a very simple matter of Objective: Action. In the first case, your objective is insert the pointy end of your sword through the orc's chest. Your action is to tell the GM what you're going to attempt to do, and roll 1d20 and add your relevant modifiers in order to skewer him like a pig.

In the second, the Objective is to convince someone (the king) to give you something (treasure) he doesn't want to give you. Your action is to tell the GM what you're going to attempt to do, roll 1d20, and add your relevant modifiers in order to fast-talk the king out of some loot.

You clearly can't read or understand even simple shit so let me spell it out. In a normal game, the players, when faced with this encounter might have ran, in this instance they stayed in character and on mood for the game and fled, if we were dealing with a guy so socially retarded that he stutters and doesn't know the word for supplies then he ruins the game no matter how many dice he does or doesn't roll and in this case he ruins it worse if he rolls a d20 to figure out how to behave in character. Turns out playing with retards ruins games...

So now having a speech impediment and getting flustered and that causing even more difficulty speaking when you're frustrated by your inability to articulate a concept you clearly understand is "being retarded?"

Wow, you're an asshole. Makes me glad I'll never be playing at you table, nor you at mine.

So in short you couldn't decide how the character played, designed, and motivated by yourself should act so you copped out and rolled some dice to see what he should do. The rest would have followed the exact same either way, except that you wouldn't have looked like an idiot.

Funnily enough, that's exactly the sort of thing Virtue dots are for, in Exalted, making decisions like that. Indeed, by the rules as written, I would have had to have rolled - and failed - the Valor roll, in order to puss out from a challenge without spending a point of WP to choose to do so.

That kind of thing can get aggravating, but it's a handy fall-back when you're on the fence about something and you want to keep something moving. People who have the luxury of not being in a position where they could suddenly find armed mobsters aiming Tommy Guns in their faces (it was 2011, but these guys had Tommy Guns because they were asshole throwbacks who thought things should be like roaring 20s movies) have the luxury of taking time to think, luxury a character who's on the scene in real-time will not have. I was ambivalent about what to do, since I could see myself making either decision in the heat of the moment, so I threw the die, let it choose for me, and guess what?

You are the only one who thinks it was idiotic. Everybody who was present at the game thought it was a damn fine idea. I'm glad you're not the storyteller.

Holy fuck, way to miss a retard joke. Please head to the locker to your left and grab your helmet, mittens, and name tag, don't forget to hold onto the rope once you leave the facility with the rest of the group.

Go have a , you might not be such a tightly-clenched asshole if you'd have a good yank.

The point is, if a player who is smart isn't able to play his low intellect character well, no amount of dice rolling will make it any less jarring. The same goes for a total moron playing a character with genius level intellect and doing it poorly. Yes you can mitigate it by applying modifiers, but they still ruin immersion and make for a shitty game and a poor group. Your examples show that a good DM could salvage that, but the campaign will always be more difficult to run with players playing characters they

Funnily enough, I find things very easy to run when a player simply articulates to me what he intends to do and lets me resolve it for him with the results of his dice roll. I also find it easy enough to resolve them when they give a good stunt. Even dumbshits occasionally have flashes of brilliance, and some people are good at speaking yet somehow never manage to get people's attention properly.

Anyway, here's what I think. There should be significant coupling between quality of roleplay and the effort required by a dice roll, but not enough to make it effectively impossible to play characters who are better at persuasive speaking than you are.

Let's take ShadowDragon's example, modified, to illustrate what I mean.

PCs want to get an advance from the king in the form of magic items, in order to launch a dangerous quest.

Example A:
Inarticulate player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player A: [Stammers out his goal, but does not present an argument.]
DM: "OK, sounds like a DC 35 skill check." (in real life nigh-impossible, but this legendarily persuasive character actually has a 50/50 chance of pulling it off)
Player A: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM, to quote SD: "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."

Now, here the DM's mistake was making the difficulty of the skill check too easy; he gave Player A's crappy argument a 50% chance of success when by all rights it shouldn't have one. He should have forced Player A to refine his argument or forced Player A to accept a penalty for not having one, reducing the character's chance of success to something lower. Player A can do better than that, if nothing else by presenting the outline of a good argument even if he couldn't actually write one.

DC 35 is by no means "too easy". I dare say that a +15 Diplomacy modifier (the bare minimum required to make the roll at all is very hard to come by; most towns won't have anybody with that kind of a modifier living there, not even the orator who does it for a living. The fact that this character, without any stunt bonus, has a +25 bonus to his skill (thus making it an average performance for him by the dice roll) says something about the legendary speaking ability of the character themselves.

Again, it comes back to the comparison between the combat contest-resolution model. Do you require every character provide an argument for how he's going to succeed on each attack, how he plans to bypass the orc's shield and stab him in the throat, in order to make the attack roll, and jack the Orc's AC up by 5 or so if the player fails to provide a "plan of action" for it?

No, you don't! And you should not!

But even then, there has to be a limit, and this is where ShadowDragon has a point. In this situation in real life, a normal person would fail to persuade the king; a sub-normal person would probably offend the king and get himself killed. A sub-normal player should not get the same result for his charismatic character as he would for himself, because otherwise he's effectively barred from ever playing charismatic characters at all.

Even someone ostensibly skilled at talking, like a politician, would almost certainly fail on a DC 35 roll. You shouldn't arbitrarily decide "well, he's not telling me how to do it, so I'm going to just jack up the DC until I feel his chances are arbitrarily slim and then make him roll against that." Because that is arbitrary (a point worth stressing, repeatedly,) and it's bad GMing.

I know a woman who stammers and gropes for words; I would let her play a charismatic character even knowing that she can't impersonate charisma. So in this situation, I would not apply a penalty for the (moderately bad but not horrible) argument by the player that made it impossible for the charismatic character to succeed- merely difficult.

Poor roleplaying should elicit penalties, but not crippling ones- just ones good enough to act as an incentive to better performance.

No, it shouldn't.

Who the fuck are you to demand that the players of the characters of the talker-types "get better or suffer moar," Huh? Do you decide to outlay penalties to Survival or Athletics rolls to the fat city guy because he's horrible at Survival and Athletics and tell him that if he wants to do it with the proper DCs, he should shape up? Of course you don't! Because that would be arbitrary and bad GMing.

Example B: (new)
Ordinary player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check

Player B: "I want to convince the king to give us some magic weapons to fight the monster."
DM: "Good luck. How do you plan to do that?"
Player B: "Hmm." [Thinks for a minute.] "I argue that the magic weapons will improve our chances of success, making them a good investment."
DM: [thinks] "You're banking on your reputation here- expecting him to count on you to not take the money and run and to actually win the fight. Then again, you guys have a decent reputation in both those departments, so... it could work. Roll a DC 35 skill check."
Player B: [passes skill check by a hair]
DM: "You just barely pulled it off. But the king threatens you- if you take the goods and run he will hunt you down. If any of it is damaged or lost, it comes out of your pay. Oh, and [grins] he wants you guys to give him something as collateral..."

This is essentially the same outcome that ShadowDragon gave his PC in Example A. And this time it's fair, because Player B put some honest effort into it. He's not a persuasive speaker, but he can at least explain what he wants and why. That "and why" is important, because it's the best an average human being is likely to be able to do in this kind of situation. The average human being should not be penalized as a player for having merely average ability.

It was fair the last time, too. The player stated his goal sufficiently that you understood him, he picked up his dice and let those bastards roll. If you really have to, you can always prod the guy who's a really bad speaker into telling you the "and why," but you shouldn't arbitrarily decide to just jack the DC up on him as a "poor speaking ability tax."

Example C: (new)
Eloquent player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check.

Player C: [States goal and presents structure of argument, along with pretty damn good speech explaining it.]
DM: "Nice. Roll a DC 35 diplomacy check with a +5 bonus."

Player C just roleplayed his (eloquent) character convincingly, and the argument he presented gives him a good chance of success in real life; it's as good as could be expected. He gets a bonus for it, with his 50/50 chance of success improved to 75/25. And that's fair.

Amounting a stunt bonus to 25% of the chances for failure or success is a bit extreme. Maybe 15%, or 25% if the numbers involved are small, but essentially this is correct: if you're going to spice the game up with this kind of thing, you should get a bonus. However, under no circumstances should you penalize a player for failure to bring the spice!

Example D:
Eloquent player, undiplomatic character (like in ShadowDragon's Example B)

Player D does what happened in SD's Example B, with the orc barbarian giving a good persuasive speech.

Now there's a problem. In real life that's a good speech that has a good chance of success. But is the speech good roleplaying? I'm not so sure. That orc barbarian isn't supposed to be a persuasive speaker- there's nothing about him that makes him good at diplomacy, or at sweet-talking kings into giving him an advance. On the one hand, you could give him a bonus for his speech. On the other hand, that speech was out of character.

If you DO give him a bonus sufficient to give him any real chance to succeed, you make it pointless for an ordinary player (such as Player B) to even bother building characters with mechanical features that enhance persuasiveness. Those features become useless, because suddenly the orc barbarian with shitty charisma and a wonderfully eloquent player is just as good at convincing the king to do things as the highly charismatic bard whose player is merely average.

The Orc Barbarian, even with a massive break on his chances to succeed, still faced a herculean skill roll; a roll he could not succeed upon with an average roll. It would've taken an extraordinary roll, and that was assuming the GM was going to be prejudiced by his awesome roleplayed tough-warrior-guy speech.

You do note that he failed. The way to handle this - a character who shouldn't be a good speaker in the hands of a player who is - isn't to tell the player that he's doing it wrong (as that will quickly infuriate the player,) but rather to make it so that the PC, despite having a logical, well-thought out impassioned argument, rubs people the wrong way. As this forum itself is ample evidence of, someone who is uncharitably disposed towards someone can take umbrage with just about anything someone says, any way they say it.

If the player gives a great, logical speech and fails to make the roll, it's not that he didn't make a great, logical and stirring speech, it's that everything he said rubbed the other guy the wrong way. Like I said, the King took offense at being reminded that he'd already lost three men on it, or the king is specist and predisposed to dislike orcs, and that has him in a foul mood. Maybe he's infuriated at being talked to that way by a lesser - point is, the orc tried it, he tried it well, his player put in an above-average stunt performance, and he blew it. You don't invalidate the stunt, you don't tell him his character calls the king a horse-fucking inbred retard, you just rule that it fails despite the Orc's best effort and move on.

And here, too, ShadowDragon has a point. Letting the dice rule everything is bad in roleplay, but so is outright removing them (and the mechanical rules) entirely. Because without mechanics, there's no way for players to pretend to be capable of feats that they can't perform in real life. Nor is there any way to force players to accept that their character isn't perfect, because the ability to describe my orc doing anything means that my orc can do anything, even things that my stated background for him and rule-based simulation of him should never allow him to do.

Perhaps it's my Exalted background showing, but I prefer a "fluid GM" style of STing. The idea is that the ST, GM, DM, Ref, has full control over absolutely everything; except the players' actions, over which he has precisely zero control short of having an NPC exert unnatural mental influence on the PC. So, say the PC is charged with a steep climbing roll to make, and he describes that his character wall-kicks between the wall and a tree-trunk until he gets to the top, but he flubs the roll. Fine, he does just that, performing the wall-kicking jumps, right up until a rotten section of the tree's trunk gives way under the kick, he sinks in, is put in peril of breaking his ankle, twists free and slides back down the tree, miraculously avoiding harming anything but his ego.

The world can always foil the players, no matter how competently they describe their awesome actions. No need to make them foil themselves.

I know there are systems that work like that, but I prefer not to follow them to that extreme. At some point, a character's built in mechanical weaknesses (including social and intellectual ones that a player can cover with roleplay) have to really limit that character. So I think that at best, the orc should get a bonus that makes it possible, barely so, to succeed... but at considerable risk; if the orc rolls poorly the king may be offended! Because he's not supposed to be the brilliant diplomat; making him the best one to do that steals someone else's opportunity in the spotlight.

As you've notice, that's exactly what happened. The Orc was faced with a roll which was possible, but ridiculously implausible. His impassioned speech made it possible, but his failure to back it up with the dice led to the king interpreting everything with as much hostility as possible, getting offended, and insulting the orc in return. I didn't order the player not to act as if his Cha 6 character was not clear-spoken, loud and powerful Worf-type speaker, but when the dice failed to have Mr. Green Worf convince the king to arm them, it wasn't the character that failed, it was the king who failed to respond properly for a variety of reasons, all of which boil down to "he was insufficiently taken in by the orc's charisma."

[GuppyShark]

... of course these are the same GMs that complain that their players only ever create combat-oriented characters and never spend points in social skills/attributes, as their players have learned that those abilities are useless thanks to the GM's biases.

They penalise the roleplayer and reward the rollplayer because the rollplayer can specialise in areas where the attributes are useful. If you're going to use your own social skills and intellect, there is no point having them in the rulebook.

And these GMs think they are preserving the sanctity of RP by elevating everyday conversation to art and reducing combat to "Roll to hit. You need a 12."

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's something of a relief to see SD go marching off into loopier territory; I'm always faintly disturbed when I find myself agreeing with him over issues like this...

Anyway, here's what I think. There should be significant coupling between quality of roleplay and the effort required by a dice roll, but not enough to make it effectively impossible to play characters who are better at persuasive speaking than you are...

PCs want to get an advance from the king in the form of magic items, in order to launch a dangerous quest.

Example A:
Inarticulate player, highly charismatic character with a +25 to diplomacy skill check...

Now, here the DM's mistake was making the difficulty of the skill check too easy; he gave Player A's crappy argument a 50% chance of success when by all rights it shouldn't have one. He should have forced Player A to refine his argument or forced Player A to accept a penalty for not having one, reducing the character's chance of success to something lower. Player A can do better than that, if nothing else by presenting the outline of a good argument even if he couldn't actually write one.

DC 35 is by no means "too easy". I dare say that a +15 Diplomacy modifier (the bare minimum required to make the roll at all is very hard to come by; most towns won't have anybody with that kind of a modifier living there, not even the orator who does it for a living. The fact that this character, without any stunt bonus, has a +25 bonus to his skill (thus making it an average performance for him by the dice roll) says something about the legendary speaking ability of the character themselves.

Context is everything in this case. The problem here is that by failing to specify his character's reasoning or basic approach, the player set themselves a nigh-impossible challenge: convince the king to give them an advance without using any logical arguments.

That's going to be significantly harder (5 points' worth of extra difficulty to the DC, I'd say) than doing the same thing with a logical argument. In this case, the player's failure is not because he personally has poor communication skills, but because he personally can't be bothered to put any thought into the role-playing session. That should drastically lower his chances of success, no matter how good his character is.

Whereas my average player (Player B) is putting that extra bit of thought into the encounter, and is proposing a viable strategy that a good orator can turn into a success. That's the baseline standard of performance, in my opinion. The player does not need to be able to make a convincing argument, but they'd damn well better be able to provide one.

Again, it comes back to the comparison between the combat contest-resolution model. Do you require every character provide an argument for how he's going to succeed on each attack, how he plans to bypass the orc's shield and stab him in the throat, in order to make the attack roll, and jack the Orc's AC up by 5 or so if the player fails to provide a "plan of action" for it?

No, you don't! And you should not!

That's because, as others point out, the bar is a lot higher in real life for social skills than for combat skills. I suck at swordfighting, and it's not reasonable to expect people not to suck at it. But it is reasonable to expect people to at least state logical motivations for their own actions, or logical reasons for other people to do as they say.

It's a question of making you put in a bit of effort in exchange for getting the full benefit of your character's awesomeness, as opposed to making that awesomeness a freebie. In combat, most players will put a fair amount of thought into coming up with effective tactics anyway; in my experience the hard part is getting them to avoid doing so. But in social situations, I want to see players at least give things a moment's thought rather than just expecting "I have Charisma 24" to translate automatically into "people shower me with rewards" with zero effort on their part.

I mean, "I have Strength 24" does let you auto-win fights; just having the high strength modifier isn't very helpful if you didn't design your character intelligently to take advantage of it. The same should go for high bonuses in negotiations.

Even someone ostensibly skilled at talking, like a politician, would almost certainly fail on a DC 35 roll. You shouldn't arbitrarily decide "well, he's not telling me how to do it, so I'm going to just jack up the DC until I feel his chances are arbitrarily slim and then make him roll against that." Because that is arbitrary (a point worth stressing, repeatedly,) and it's bad GMing.

Remember that the implication in this situation is that the king is always going to be a resistant target. Even when someone made a really good speech for him, the DC was 25. You're implying that (in game terms) the king has a very high Sense Motive check, or that he's hostile to the PC negotiator, or some such.

Yes, DC 35 Diplomacy checks are very hard to make. But it is not unrealistic to find people capable of making them in a D&D campaign. Kings who don't get talked out of their throne in a D&D setting should have that kind of resistance to sweet-talking, especially sweet-talking by people who have obvious ulterior motives.

You might be able to talk some stupid peasant into giving you an advance with a much lower Diplomacy check, but the king is going to be a hard target. The only question is how hard. In my opinion, the king should be an appropriate diplomatic challenge for the players, as opposed to being some chump they can rob blind by fast-talking him. Hence the DC 35 skill check- it's tuned to the party's level of ability, just as a combat encounter would be.

You upgrade the difficulty of beating monsters in your campaign so that the PCs will be challenged; you should do the same thing with negotiations.

Who the fuck are you to demand that the players of the characters of the talker-types "get better or suffer moar," Huh? Do you decide to outlay penalties to Survival or Athletics rolls to the fat city guy because he's horrible at Survival and Athletics and tell him that if he wants to do it with the proper DCs, he should shape up? Of course you don't! Because that would be arbitrary and bad GMing.

Role-playing is a social activity. Role-playing is not an athletic activity. I do expect some minimal level of social performance out of players- they don't have to be expert fast-talkers, but they at least have to physically own a fucking brain. They should be able to tell the DM what they want, and why, and to recognize that some arguments are really shitty if the DM smacks them with a suitable clue-bat.

A player who cannot do this deserves to get hit with penalties, because he's making his character do a shitty job. It's like a trap-filled dungeon. The party thief scouts ahead to defuse the traps, right? Well, if the player says "Well, I'm trying to disable the traps, so my character charges straight down the hall and knocks down the door with a flying kick," he's going to set off a bunch of traps and probably get shot full of arrows or fall into a pit or something. And he can't say "but I have +25 to disable traps, so it works!" Because he's being a fucking idiot- that's a stupid way to disable traps, and if he insists on acting that way, it makes it impossible for the character to use his massive +25 bonus.

It doesn't matter how good his character's trap-defusing skills are if the player is such a moron that he neuters the character's abilities by refusing to use them properly. Likewise, if the player is a big enough moron to say "I try to convince the king to give me an advance on my reward by hitting on his wife," he deserves to get his butt kicked, because that's a stupid way to do things.

For physical activities (where characters are almost always much, much better than players), the standard of performance is that you must avoid describing your actions in ways that obviously fail. If you say you try to open a trapped door by headbutting it, you get penalized.

For social activities, the bar is higher because the average player is better socially than physically. So the standard rises: a respectable, competent player should be able to describe a social plan of action that makes a bit of sense, just as they should be able to describe a physical plan of action that is not obviously loaded with fail.

Remember, all I'm looking for here is "my character tries to convince the king to give us an advance, arguing that we need better weapons in order to succeed." That's enough to pass the bar as far as I'm concerned, because it shows that the player used his brain.

It was fair the last time, too. The player stated his goal sufficiently that you understood him, he picked up his dice and let those bastards roll. If you really have to, you can always prod the guy who's a really bad speaker into telling you the "and why," but you shouldn't arbitrarily decide to just jack the DC up on him as a "poor speaking ability tax."

It's not a "poor speaking ability" tax. It's a "grow a fucking brain" tax. I will prod the guy into giving a rationale if I can; it's only if he fails to do so and doesn't grasp the need to do so that he gets hit with a penalty. And it's only a truly crippling penalty if the failure is total, if he proposes something so dumb that anyone with a mind can see it shouldn't work.

At which point he's equivalent to the moron who tries to disable a trapped corridor by running through it as fast as he can and bashing the door at the far end down with a flying kick.

Amounting a stunt bonus to 25% of the chances for failure or success is a bit extreme. Maybe 15%, or 25% if the numbers involved are small, but essentially this is correct: if you're going to spice the game up with this kind of thing, you should get a bonus. However, under no circumstances should you penalize a player for failure to bring the spice!

Well, to me a certain amount of spice is part of the recipe: I expect my players to be good enough cooks not to forget the salt, as it were. And I haven't met many people who couldn't do that.

You do note that he failed. The way to handle this - a character who shouldn't be a good speaker in the hands of a player who is - isn't to tell the player that he's doing it wrong (as that will quickly infuriate the player,) but rather to make it so that the PC, despite having a logical, well-thought out impassioned argument, rubs people the wrong way.

In general, yes... but what happens when the same character starts turning out identical impassioned speeches in situations where the Diplomacy DC is lower?

The point here is to keep the bonus for "spice" from becoming a freebie awarded to players who happen to be good speakers. If your PC isn't good at public speaking, you the player should not be spamming good speeches in an attempt to automatically win him the rewards of being a great diplomat. Not if someone else is sincerely trying to run the party diplomat but happens to have inferior speaking skills as a player.

The world can always foil the players, no matter how competently they describe their awesome actions. No need to make them foil themselves.

I can live with that. At some point, though, there are valid concerns about how a player is using the descriptive aspects to make their character too good- trying to build themselves a superhero with no flaws by using their power of descriptive speech. From what I've heard about Exalted that might actually be a reasonable thing to do in that setting, but it's not a reasonable thing to do in most other settings.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Context is everything in this case. The problem here is that by failing to specify his character's reasoning or basic approach, the player set themselves a nigh-impossible challenge: convince the king to give them an advance without using any logical arguments.

And here is where you are failing. You're assuming that because the PC has failed to specify the character's reasoning or basic approach, he doesn't have one. Look at the character's stats. Does he have an Intelligence score above that of a retard (say, anything that's 8 or above?) Then one can safely assume that even if the PC doesn't specify his argument or approach, the character still has one.

You don't, after all, jack up the Orc's armor class because the player doesn't specify how he plans to swing his sword to get past the orc's guard.

That's going to be significantly harder (5 points' worth of extra difficulty to the DC, I'd say) than doing the same thing with a logical argument. In this case, the player's failure is not because he personally has poor communication skills, but because he personally can't be bothered to put any thought into the role-playing session. That should drastically lower his chances of success, no matter how good his character is.

Or possibly because he failed to articulate it to you, because he has a tremendous stutter and just getting out the concept of "I want to convince the king to let us have some weapons" is hard enough for him. He's specified his intended goal (convince the king to let him have weapons,) anything above that is in the realm of bonus gravy.

If the Fighter gives you a description of how he's planning to run up to the orc, beat the orc's shield aside (into his own sword's path) and up (above his head) with his own shield, and then stab him through the gap in his armor that is his armpit, he's going above and beyond and probably deserves a +1 or +2 bonus to the attack roll. All that is required of him is to say "I attack the orc" and roll 1d20.

Likewise, all that is required of the party speaker is "I convince the king to give us weapons," and to roll 1d20. You are arbitrarily deciding that since you think the player did not put enough effort into telling you how he's going to convince the king to give him weapons, to jack the AC up until the player's chances for success are 25% or less.

Whereas my average player (Player B) is putting that extra bit of thought into the encounter, and is proposing a viable strategy that a good orator can turn into a success. That's the baseline standard of performance, in my opinion. The player does not need to be able to make a convincing argument, but they'd damn well better be able to provide one.

It's preferable, but it's not required. I'd give him a small bonus (+1) for coming up with a logical reason for it if he asked for one.

That's because, as others point out, the bar is a lot higher in real life for social skills than for combat skills. I suck at swordfighting, and it's not reasonable to expect people not to suck at it. But it is reasonable to expect people to at least state logical motivations for their own actions, or logical reasons for other people to do as they say.

Reasonable, yes. Mandatory, no. You're fiating the player to make him suck moar if you arbitrarily give him a penalty because he's having trouble telling you why he wants the king to do what he wants the king to do.

It's a question of making you put in a bit of effort in exchange for getting the full benefit of your character's awesomeness, as opposed to making that awesomeness a freebie. In combat, most players will put a fair amount of thought into coming up with effective tactics anyway; in my experience the hard part is getting them to avoid doing so. But in social situations, I want to see players at least give things a moment's thought rather than just expecting "I have Charisma 24" to translate automatically into "people shower me with rewards" with zero effort on their part.

Except that "I have Charisma 24" is a valid tactic to get people to shower one with accolades and rewards. The name Paris Hilton ring a bell?

I mean, "I have Strength 24" does let you auto-win fights; just having the high strength modifier isn't very helpful if you didn't design your character intelligently to take advantage of it. The same should go for high bonuses in negotiations.

Which would be represented by the fact that he's obviously sank a kilofuckton of skill points into Diplomacy, character points into Charisma, and probably taken a lot of feats that help him affect other people? Like I said: you don't make the orc-slayer describe how he gets through the orc's armor, and so you shouldn't make this guy tell you how he gets the king to hand over weapons.

Remember that the implication in this situation is that the king is always going to be a resistant target. Even when someone made a really good speech for him, the DC was 25. You're implying that (in game terms) the king has a very high Sense Motive check, or that he's hostile to the PC negotiator, or some such.

Yes, DC 35 Diplomacy checks are very hard to make. But it is not unrealistic to find people capable of making them in a D&D campaign. Kings who don't get talked out of their throne in a D&D setting should have that kind of resistance to sweet-talking, especially sweet-talking by people who have obvious ulterior motives.

You might be able to talk some stupid peasant into giving you an advance with a much lower Diplomacy check, but the king is going to be a hard target. The only question is how hard. In my opinion, the king should be an appropriate diplomatic challenge for the players, as opposed to being some chump they can rob blind by fast-talking him. Hence the DC 35 skill check- it's tuned to the party's level of ability, just as a combat encounter would be.

You upgrade the difficulty of beating monsters in your campaign so that the PCs will be challenged; you should do the same thing with negotiations.

DC 35 is already a steep challenge. Even the Glorious Elf Rocker faced a 50% chance of failure, which is the expected rate of failure for a fully-tweaked Fighter with all the magical swag he can wear and carry when attempting to apply sword to a leveled, equipped, CR-matched Orc. You're just arbitrarily upgrading it to punish the player, not to challenge the characters.

Role-playing is a social activity. Role-playing is not an athletic activity. I do expect some minimal level of social performance out of players- they don't have to be expert fast-talkers, but they at least have to physically own a fucking brain. They should be able to tell the DM what they want, and why, and to recognize that some arguments are really shitty if the DM smacks them with a suitable clue-bat.

And if they have a brain but have a malfunctioning brain-mouth filter that's filtering everything and making them stutter, and they only get frustrated and stutter more when they cannot articulate what they want to say?

A player who cannot do this deserves to get hit with penalties, because he's making his character do a shitty job. It's like a trap-filled dungeon. The party thief scouts ahead to defuse the traps, right? Well, if the player says "Well, I'm trying to disable the traps, so my character charges straight down the hall and knocks down the door with a flying kick," he's going to set off a bunch of traps and probably get shot full of arrows or fall into a pit or something. And he can't say "but I have +25 to disable traps, so it works!" Because he's being a fucking idiot- that's a stupid way to disable traps, and if he insists on acting that way, it makes it impossible for the character to use his massive +25 bonus.

False analogy. The Rogue behaving like a Dwarven Barbarian "trapfinder" is the Rogue being a moron. All the Rogue has to do, however, to disable traps is to say "I'm going to disable the traps," which automatically means he's calling for Search checks to find them and Disable Device traps to disable them.

Likewise, the PC in question isn't just saying "Um, can we have some weapons?" He's saying "I'm going to convince the king to give me weapons," which means he's calling for a diplomacy check.

It doesn't matter how good his character's trap-defusing skills are if the player is such a moron that he neuters the character's abilities by refusing to use them properly. Likewise, if the player is a big enough moron to say "I try to convince the king to give me an advance on my reward by hitting on his wife," he deserves to get his butt kicked, because that's a stupid way to do things.

Except he's not saying "I'm gonna hit on the Queen," he's just stating his goal and asking for his right to roll for it. He's nonspecific about how he plans to do that, just like the player is nonspecific about how he intends to assault the orc. If he says "I attack the Orc," and roll 1d20, it would be wrong of you to immediately interpret his attack as unfavorably as possible and unilaterally decide that he launches an unarmed attack by kicking the orc and provoking an Attack of Opportunity, which is what you're suggesting by insinuating that you'll interpret the player's argument in such a manner that if he blows the roll he risks the king's wrath.

For physical activities (where characters are almost always much, much better than players), the standard of performance is that you must avoid describing your actions in ways that obviously fail. If you say you try to open a trapped door by headbutting it, you get penalized.

These are wonderful strawmen you're creating! I love them, do they scare away crows? The player hasn't said "I'm going to go up to the king and schmooze his wife," he has simply stated his plan of action without further elaboration. If that's not enough for you, Ask him how he plans to talk it up to the king, don't just arbitrarily jack up the DC!

Remember, all I'm looking for here is "my character tries to convince the king to give us an advance, arguing that we need better weapons in order to succeed." That's enough to pass the bar as far as I'm concerned, because it shows that the player used his brain.

So people with speech impediments are stupid?

It's not a "poor speaking ability" tax. It's a "grow a fucking brain" tax. I will prod the guy into giving a rationale if I can; it's only if he fails to do so and doesn't grasp the need to do so that he gets hit with a penalty. And it's only a truly crippling penalty if the failure is total, if he proposes something so dumb that anyone with a mind can see it shouldn't work.

Ah, yes. Apparently you are claiming that people with speech impediments are stupid! Thanks for clearing that up.

He is not proposing something dumb at all! He's not saying "I'm going to seduce the queen into giving us weapons right in front of her husband," he's saying he's going to convince the King to do it! That is enough, there.

At which point he's equivalent to the moron who tries to disable a trapped corridor by running through it as fast as he can and bashing the door at the far end down with a flying kick.

And he has proposed no such thing!

Well, to me a certain amount of spice is part of the recipe: I expect my players to be good enough cooks not to forget the salt, as it were. And I haven't met many people who couldn't do that.

Or his hands are trembling so bad he can't pick the salt up without spilling the shaker onto the floor.

In general, yes... but what happens when the same character starts turning out identical impassioned speeches in situations where the Diplomacy DC is lower?

Then... He can succeed? Even Forest Gump has a chance of spouting off the kind of pearls of wisdom that make people take notice, just like Worf, for all that he's loud and lacks tact, can stir passions and convince people with his tough-guy routine when the DC's not so hard as making a hostile character friendly in one go.

So if Dire Orc MacSpikypants of the Spikypants Clan is facing a situation where the DC is lower (say, rousing the spirits of a demoralized people who desperately want a champion who can bolster them,) then they probably won't pick apart his speech for reasons to hate it, nor will they care overmuch about his orc pit smell.

The point here is to keep the bonus for "spice" from becoming a freebie awarded to players who happen to be good speakers. If your PC isn't good at public speaking, you the player should not be spamming good speeches in an attempt to automatically win him the rewards of being a great diplomat. Not if someone else is sincerely trying to run the party diplomat but happens to have inferior speaking skills as a player.

"Automatically?" Hardly automatically. If he's good enough to bring the stunt bonuses that give him a shot, even a long shot at success, you let him roll his dice and risk failure. "Automatically" is the reward of the guy who's built his character to do it, just like Orcy MacSpikeypants can pretty much "automatically" vanquish almost any foe, whereas the Glam Rocker Glorious Elf would have a monumental challenge ahead of him to vanquish anything within five levels below him, let alone at or above his own level..

I can live with that. At some point, though, there are valid concerns about how a player is using the descriptive aspects to make their character too good- trying to build themselves a superhero with no flaws by using their power of descriptive speech. From what I've heard about Exalted that might actually be a reasonable thing to do in that setting, but it's not a reasonable thing to do in most other settings.

You can do one of two things, when faced with Orcy MacSpikeypants. You can piss him off by telling him to play his character as if he were a retard, or you can let him play as Mr. Worf, and let him get foiled approximately as often. I know, it's not a perfect analogy, since Mr. Worf was the guy who needed to get beaten up to show just how tough the Monster of the Week was (though why they didn't use Data for that, I don't know,) but the point remains; if he wants to play his character as if he's great at delivering tough-guy speeches and he's not got the stats to back it up, let him try it, give him a bonus appropriate to the amazing effort, then let him fail horribly and have the Glam Rocker Glorious Elf step in and almost out-of-hand save the negotiating day.

[Simon_Jester]

Or possibly because he failed to articulate it to you, because he has a tremendous stutter and just getting out the concept of "I want to convince the king to let us have some weapons" is hard enough for him. He's specified his intended goal (convince the king to let him have weapons,) anything above that is in the realm of bonus gravy.

See, that's the difference right there.

In combat, because I know I'm talking to people who have no combat skills, I do not expect anything beyond the vaguest statement of intent. Even if someone at the table knew how to describe an effective melee attack, I wouldn't know one if I heard it. So anything beyond a vague statement of intent is just spice, as you say.

In conversation, or in puzzle solving, I'm talking to people I can reasonably expect to have the wit to apply a little thought to what they are doing. Not charisma, not innate speechwriting talent, thought. And it makes for a crappy frustrating role-playing experience when all interactions between PCs and NPCs boil down to "Player of PC with highest diplomacy score mutters that he's going to attempt something, then succeeds/fails and we go fight something."

I don't know about you, but I'm better at critical thinking than I am at fighting with swords. A fair standard of performance, enough to present me-the-player with an interesting challenge, requires me to do more with my (adequate) critical thinking skills than it would require me to do with my (nearly nonexistent) swordfighting skills.

So while detailed description of the arguments I'm going to use is still "spice" over and above the dice rolls... I'm a good enough "cook" in this area that a certain amount of spice is expected. If I do not supply any spice, my performance is sub-par.

The reason this becomes a problem is that it doesn't give the DM anything to work with. What if I fail the check? If all I said was "I try to persuade the king to give us an advance," all he can really say is "no," without making unwarranted assumptions about what the player is doing. If I say "I try to persuade the king to give us an advance because it'll make us more effective at finishing the quest," he has more context to work with in explaining why my check fails.

An RPG group needs a certain amount of raw working material for roleplaying to occur. If the party's prime negotiator isn't supply any working material for the others, he's not doing his share to make the game enjoyable, and he should be encouraged to push himself to come up with more material- to examine his assumptions, to state logical reasons for actions, and so on. That makes the game more enjoyable for everyone.

It's a question of making you put in a bit of effort in exchange for getting the full benefit of your character's awesomeness, as opposed to making that awesomeness a freebie. In combat, most players will put a fair amount of thought into coming up with effective tactics anyway; in my experience the hard part is getting them to avoid doing so. But in social situations, I want to see players at least give things a moment's thought rather than just expecting "I have Charisma 24" to translate automatically into "people shower me with rewards" with zero effort on their part.

Except that "I have Charisma 24" is a valid tactic to get people to shower one with accolades and rewards. The name Paris Hilton ring a bell?

...What makes you think Paris Hilton has charisma 24? She's famous because she's the daughter of a line of rich men, and because she has so few inhibitions that she gets a nationwide reputation as a skank. Not because she's a genius at persuasive speaking, or especially beautiful.

More seriously, why is it unreasonable to expect players to have to put a bit of effort into roleplaying to get what they want? I'm not talking "compose your own sonnet" here or anything- all I want is for them to spend like five or ten seconds thinking about what kind of thing they might want to say. Compared to the hours the typical group will spend on fighting, and the minutes they'll spend bickering over the optimal combat tactics.

What's the problem?

I mean, "I have Strength 24" does let you auto-win fights; just having the high strength modifier isn't very helpful if you didn't design your character intelligently to take advantage of it. The same should go for high bonuses in negotiations.

Which would be represented by the fact that he's obviously sank a kilofuckton of skill points into Diplomacy, character points into Charisma, and probably taken a lot of feats that help him affect other people? Like I said: you don't make the orc-slayer describe how he gets through the orc's armor, and so you shouldn't make this guy tell you how he gets the king to hand over weapons.

The player of the guy with the high strength modifier is expected to use that modifier intelligently: to pick weapons and tactics that let him bring it to bear on the enemy. I would argue that the guy with the high Diplomacy modifier is expected to do the same thing: to put a bit of thought into the tools and tactics that he can use to bring his diplomacy to bear. If he doesn't bother, he's putting in less work to achieve success than a competent person playing a melee tank is.

DC 35 is already a steep challenge. Even the Glorious Elf Rocker faced a 50% chance of failure, which is the expected rate of failure for a fully-tweaked Fighter with all the magical swag he can wear and carry when attempting to apply sword to a leveled, equipped, CR-matched Orc. You're just arbitrarily upgrading it to punish the player, not to challenge the characters.

DC 35 would be a reasonable level of challenge for the Glorious Elf Rocker... if the Glorious Elf Rocker isn't being neutered by his player doing the wrong thing.

And again, I'm going to try to prevent the player from screwing his character's chances. It's not exactly rocket science to ask "how are you going to try to convince the king?" Or "what do you think might be a good reason for the king to do that?" Or something. It hardly matters; the point is that in a role playing game, the players should be capable of playing the roles their characters occupy. Of at least pretending to be the person they're playing as, making all due allowances for the fact that they aren't superheroes (and the PCs are).

And if they have a brain but have a malfunctioning brain-mouth filter that's filtering everything and making them stutter, and they only get frustrated and stutter more when they cannot articulate what they want to say?

Someone who has a severe and permanent stammer, that I've been used to for months?

In that case I'll make allowances, up to a point, because I know they're trying. The point depends on just how messed up their speech patterns are.

But a guy who's half-assing negotiations and counting on his character build to win the day for him deserves to get his ass kicked, just like a guy who half-asses combat and relies on his character build letting him always use the perfect trick in every situation deserves to get his ass kicked.

False analogy. The Rogue behaving like a Dwarven Barbarian "trapfinder" is the Rogue being a moron. All the Rogue has to do, however, to disable traps is to say "I'm going to disable the traps," which automatically means he's calling for Search checks to find them and Disable Device traps to disable them.

The rogue trying to find traps by crashing into them is an extreme example of a character whose great skill is being neutered by an incompetent player. There are less extreme examples: like the person who rolls social skill checks without making any effort to analyze the situation.

The only time I'm OK with that is when someone has a disability that prevents them from analyzing the situation, either because they can't express the results of the analysis, or because the part of their brain that looks at social skills isn't working properly. I sympathize with people like that... but they're not common enough to be the rule.

For physical activities (where characters are almost always much, much better than players), the standard of performance is that you must avoid describing your actions in ways that obviously fail. If you say you try to open a trapped door by headbutting it, you get penalized.

These are wonderful strawmen you're creating! I love them, do they scare away crows? The player hasn't said "I'm going to go up to the king and schmooze his wife," he has simply stated his plan of action without further elaboration. If that's not enough for you, Ask him how he plans to talk it up to the king, don't just arbitrarily jack up the DC!

Oh, I would. If he doesn't come up with an answer, a slight penalty; you're probably right about -5 being excessive. If he gives a dumbass answer (hardly impossible), then a -5 (possibly even more if it's really epically bad) is fully appropriate, just as it would be if the rogue tried to "search for traps" by headbutting the door.

Remember, all I'm looking for here is "my character tries to convince the king to give us an advance, arguing that we need better weapons in order to succeed." That's enough to pass the bar as far as I'm concerned, because it shows that the player used his brain.

So people with speech impediments are stupid?

If I know someone has a speech impediment, I damn well make allowances.

Most people I know who don't bother to explain themselves don't do it because they have a speech impediment; they do it because they don't care, or didn't think, or don't believe they need to think. Or because they expect that thinking they should have something will give it to them.

I specifically mentioned an exception; she's DM of my current D&D campaign, and I would definitely make allowances for her tendency to stumble over her own words if she wanted to play party face next time around.

It's not a "poor speaking ability" tax. It's a "grow a fucking brain" tax. I will prod the guy into giving a rationale if I can; it's only if he fails to do so and doesn't grasp the need to do so that he gets hit with a penalty. And it's only a truly crippling penalty if the failure is total, if he proposes something so dumb that anyone with a mind can see it shouldn't work.

Ah, yes. Apparently you are claiming that people with speech impediments are stupid! Thanks for clearing that up.

Please reread the underlined passage.

In general, yes... but what happens when the same character starts turning out identical impassioned speeches in situations where the Diplomacy DC is lower?

Then... He can succeed? Even Forest Gump has a chance of spouting off the kind of pearls of wisdom that make people take notice, just like Worf, for all that he's loud and lacks tact, can stir passions and convince people with his tough-guy routine when the DC's not so hard as making a hostile character friendly in one go.

So if Dire Orc MacSpikypants of the Spikypants Clan is facing a situation where the DC is lower (say, rousing the spirits of a demoralized people who desperately want a champion who can bolster them,) then they probably won't pick apart his speech for reasons to hate it, nor will they care overmuch about his orc pit smell.

Sure. Fine.

But only if this ability isn't used all the time. If a player is constantly using their ability to come up with inspiring speeches on the fly to give himself a permanent +5 or whatever bonus to his Diplomacy checks, and if he's playing a character who put no effort into diplomacy... there's a problem. Just as if he's playing an idiot character who somehow is always the first one to realize that the party is walking into a trap.

Just as a character's strengths should be played convincingly if at all possible, a character's weaknesses should be played convincingly.

[Rossum]

Video Games that I think would be cool to have a PnP version of:

The Megaman games, particularly the Legends series but maybe the origional games, Megaman X series or even a version of the Protomen rock opera put into a PnP form.

The Mario series with the possibility to play as a Koopa Troopa or even a goomba (as long as there are kuribos shoes available and goombas can wear protective helmets).

Sonic the Hedgehog (maybe).


Half-Life

[Kheitain]

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.

That is still the most epic session I have ever played. Including trying to smash pots with a frying pan.

I do though agree with Shadow Dragon, we're playing an RPG as a form of escapism. The dumber-than-a-post guy playing the cocky fighter waving his sword 100ft. from shore is playing a fighter because he get's thrashed by the girl guides, let alone ogres. I personally tend to play conniving, evil, sneaky little shits because I'm a terrible liar and couldn't sneak past a corpse. Why wouldn't the stuttering social retard (probably 80% of us on here) want to play Casanova?

There's no reason a DM can't slide the easily embarrassed player a note saying, "due to your ranks in ____ you know ____." I understand the suspension of disbelief issue, but coaxing a bit from a player having a hard time, "Why should the king agree with you?" *wait for stuttering reply* and then weaving it together a bit based on the roll of the dice. As the DM we're assuming your oratory to be good enough, most DM's when seeing a critical on the dice will add some flourish to the hit or fumble.

We're playing to be something we're not, I don't paticularily want to play, "Jon the Handy Trucker trying to put himself through uni."

[Simon_Jester]

It's certainly fair to make allowances.

I expect a certain amount of intellectual effort from the players: they need to give a little thought to tactics in combat, a little thought to how to approach social situations, and if they don't they do deserve to get hit with some penalties and problems.

But I certainly don't expect them to be geniuses, or to automatically come up with good plans. I prefer to work with players to develop their plans... but I expect them to understand why they would want to develop such plans.

[Kheitain]

Anyways, to reply to the actual thread. Starcraft would make a pretty awesome PnP I reckon.

Human or Protoss could have a class or skill based system while Zerg players could have a more morphic build. Maybe they could start as grubs and buy their physical attributes and stats as they went, eventually becoming an Ultralisk or absorbing something else and becoming something Kerrigan-esque. Balance would be difficult but it would certainly make for interesting party builds, Zerg needing to absorb biomass, but never needing stuff, Terran only needing gear and Protoss needing psychic energy and gear, but can't absorb the energy if the biomass is assimilated.

Combat mechanics and the like I would imagine could be run on a d20 type system allowing for massive amounts of armour/psychic shields or whatever. It would also alter the core PnP party of Healer, Blaster, Monkey and Tank as it would be more resource based strategy in your RPG.

Developing something that would cause a Zergling, a Ghost and a Templar to go adventuring would be the hard part I suspect. I've just kind of pulled this out of my ass because I couldn't sleep, I get that there are more holes in this idea than swiss cheese.

[Rossum]

I had once played a freeform Warhammer 40k game where a group of Space Marines went into a city with the aim to free it from Tau occupants by assassinating the Ethereal in charge.

After that was done I got the urge to play a Starcraft game where a team of Terren marines, ghosts, and whatnot go into a Zerg controlled city with the aim of taking out their air defenses so that a squadron of Wraiths could fly in and attack the place. I figured it would be a sort of stealth game where they keep out of sight of the flying Overlords over the city and avoid all the zerglings and pitfalls that the creep creates. Having the area be a former Terren city would give more opportunity for cover due to the buildings being there.

Unfortunately, I'm a really bad DM and could never get the game off the ground.

[Xenophon13]

Anyways, to reply to the actual thread. Starcraft would make a pretty awesome PnP I reckon.

Human or Protoss could have a class or skill based system while Zerg players could have a more morphic build. Maybe they could start as grubs and buy their physical attributes and stats as they went, eventually becoming an Ultralisk or absorbing something else and becoming something Kerrigan-esque. Balance would be difficult but it would certainly make for interesting party builds, Zerg needing to absorb biomass, but never needing stuff, Terran only needing gear and Protoss needing psychic energy and gear, but can't absorb the energy if the biomass is assimilated.

Combat mechanics and the like I would imagine could be run on a d20 type system allowing for massive amounts of armour/psychic shields or whatever. It would also alter the core PnP party of Healer, Blaster, Monkey and Tank as it would be more resource based strategy in your RPG.

Developing something that would cause a Zergling, a Ghost and a Templar to go adventuring would be the hard part I suspect. I've just kind of pulled this out of my ass because I couldn't sleep, I get that there are more holes in this idea than swiss cheese.

You took mine. It think zerg players might not work though.

[Jade Falcon]

I'd say fallout.

I remeber breafly playing a Fallout campaign 5-6 years ago, I think we used a modified D&D 3rd ed system for it.

Closest you're going to get is Darwins World

http://www.rpgobjects.com/index.php?c=dw

They even have their own analogues of the Brotherhood of Steel and a fully detailed US.

[ebs2323]

i think a Mass Effect PnP would do alright. Im not sure what sytem to use though, i have only had the chance to use D&D 3.5, and D&D 4.0. If i were to run it today i would use D20 modern, with a few tweeks to the classes, and gear.

[Rossum]

Anyways, to reply to the actual thread. Starcraft would make a pretty awesome PnP I reckon.

Human or Protoss could have a class or skill based system while Zerg players could have a more morphic build. Maybe they could start as grubs and buy their physical attributes and stats as they went, eventually becoming an Ultralisk or absorbing something else and becoming something Kerrigan-esque. Balance would be difficult but it would certainly make for interesting party builds, Zerg needing to absorb biomass, but never needing stuff, Terran only needing gear and Protoss needing psychic energy and gear, but can't absorb the energy if the biomass is assimilated.

Combat mechanics and the like I would imagine could be run on a d20 type system allowing for massive amounts of armour/psychic shields or whatever. It would also alter the core PnP party of Healer, Blaster, Monkey and Tank as it would be more resource based strategy in your RPG.

Developing something that would cause a Zergling, a Ghost and a Templar to go adventuring would be the hard part I suspect. I've just kind of pulled this out of my ass because I couldn't sleep, I get that there are more holes in this idea than swiss cheese.

You took mine. It think zerg players might not work though.

Yeah, Zerg seem like they would best fill the roll of the weak monsters you can slaughter wholesale because they are already trying to kill everyone niche.

Though there could be some possibilities. Maybe there are infected Terrans that were able to retain their personalities after the conversion? Zerg swarm a Terren outpost and kill all who fight back, then they round up all the survivors and start infecting them with Zerg cells to use them for the good of the swarm. Most of these would be too messed up for anything other than the suicide bombs seen in the game, but a few might have strength on par with some zerg units. However, one in a thousand infected terrens manage to retain enough of their sense of self that they can escape the swarm.

One in a million might have the level of success that Kerrigan had and become some sort of zerg leader, but most would be around the level of weak troops. These ones try to escape from the hive and the player character ones manage to get back to civilization. Maybe some highly unethical experimentation on the part of terren scientists acheive similar results. Infected Terrens get the sanity of humans, some zerg 'weaponry', and a sort of stealth ability around the zerg since the regular zerg monsters would detect them as being just another member of the swarm at first glance.

Though there might be some domesticated zerglings or something that could go along with players. In zerg campaign there was a case where the death of one of the cerebrates resulted in their whole hive going berserk and uncontrolled. This would imply that zerg creatures could exist in some manner outside the swarm but not necessarily be controlled and its not easy for another cerebrate to just pick up all the feral zergs if their chain of command is severed.

So, terren military manage to capture some zerg creatures (maybe grab the larva before they grow up or otherwise capture some zerg units) then sever the connection with some sort of psionic blocker or perhaps lobotomize the creature to remove the psychic receiver in its brain... some terren brainwashing techniques could help as well.

Thus, if you really need a zerg unit on your side then enough science could result in a zerg unit that is loyal to terren or protos ideas (like a big puppy dog that obeys its master, even if its master isn't the leader of a wolf pack like its canine brain had evolved all those loyalty thought processes for in the first place).

So yeah, the Zerg swarm itself could be full of the genocidal bugs out to kill everyone else but a few exceptions could be in place to allow Zerg heroes fighting against the rest of them.

Oh, and thats not even getting into any rogue Cererates that don't like working under Kerrigan (or can't because she wants to kill them). The Terrens and Protoss might get a call from a rogue Cerabrate who is willing to help them deal with Kerrigan and lends a few elite troops to the team. Rogue cerebrate combined with intelligent infected terrans or lobotomised zerglings might give plenty of options for players who want to play as the same big bugs everyone else is trying to kill.

[Jade Falcon]

The Gabriel Knight series. If it had the background of the main characters well enough written out and the history of the Schattenjagers it could make for an interesting game.

[Norade]

You can do 40k style games using the Cyberpunk 2020 system. Just start with 10's as base stats, and metal gear as guard carapace and go from there. You can even do physic powers as a skill test. I ran a fun game where the players were a Sergeant, a Heavy Bolter Gunner, and a Sanctioned Pysker and they with some support from the storm bolter on their drop pod took out a small chaos outpost before plunging into a Necron hive. By the end each character was in mortal 6 or worse and fighting on due to the medical systems and extra organs, the Heavy Bolter guy had a gut filled with bio foam, the Pysker had lost his leg and the Sergeant's armor was was stripped and warped from Gauss weapons and his muscles were showing over his entire chest. It was an epic little game that was a riot to run.

[Neo Rasa]

Closest you're going to get is Darwins World

http://www.rpgobjects.com/index.php?c=dw

All these and the earlier suggestions are nice but wouldn't the "closest" be the modified GURPS pen and paper rules that came on the Fallout 1 and 2 game disks? The rolls are all listed by each skill in-game and Fallout 2 even has an Alternity quick-start for it included on the disk. The character creation screen has that "PRINT" button on it for a reason.

Someone already mentioned Mass Effect. Alternity would be perfect for it. Not just because it emphasizes sci-fi settings (wonder if anyone ever actually used those iron age/etc. weapon stats in the source book) but because it already has rules built in for safely using and being hit by weapons that inflict elemental and electrical damage like what we see in Mass Effect 2.