Roll Play vs Roleplay; the spectrum

[Dredwulf60]

So all GMs are aware that there is a spectrum to any RPG.

On the one end, have an interactive narrative with your players, where no dice are ever rolled. The players state their actions and provide their dialogue and the GM decides the outcome based on the established information and what he/she feels is desired for the narrative.

On the other end is a game where actions are decided by players and dice and tables are consulted to determine the results of all outcomes, even to the point of players actions and reactions being dictated by the framework of the dice and game system.

Every game fits somewhere along this spectrum and likely shifts position depending on the circumstances.

I've often seen people with the opinion that pure role play is better than roll-play. I went through that phase myself; but to me, now, I've come to believe that good roll-play can stimulate good roleplay.

In a way, it's like when you have actors on a set with nothing but green-screen to interact with. The director tells them: "You are in a big arena, there are thousands of spectators here to watch your death...the monsters are now coming to get you....now act!"

But if you have a practical set and actual stunt men in monster-suits, its easier for the actors to give a good performance, because they have cues to how they should respond.

In an RPG, I believe the dice-rolling serves the same purpose. The results of the dice rolls are not the end of the process, but an indication for the player on how to interpret the events.

This is probably why my games have more 'crunch', because I like to give my players a sophisticated framework that they can hang their performances on.

Part of my philosophy is player agency; giving my players the illusion that they can go anywhere and do anything they like...as long as they are willing to take the consequences of their actions. And they can judge those consequences fairly accurately by knowing that the dice, not the GM will play a large part in their fate.

ie, years ago, I used to have my player parties refuse to retreat, thinking that there is no way the GM would set them up against something that was beyond their ability to handle.

Now, my players know better.

Looking for other thoughts on where GMs stand in the spectrum.

[garhkal]

I lean more to the roll over role, as often having that framework in place, keeps everyone in check. It makes them all aware of what they can/can't do, and everyone's on an even playing field. Where as often at the other end of the spectrum, where someone's Role playing, subsumes over their character's stats, favoritism or how WELL a player can act/is glib/intelligent over the DM/GM/Story teller, or situation.
In those games, i often wonder WHY even keep having character sheets where those mental/social skills are worried about if they are going to be effectively ignored in favor of Player skill.

BUT then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, where if you are only going by the stats on a sheet, why even have players run them. It is akin to a catch 22 situation.
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Savar]

the farther a player has a char from his own skill set the more roll seems to matter.

as with most pnp gaming it's a bell curve. somewhere in the middle is the best, and hardest to achieve. gm and players both affect it. I have played under a number of gms, systems, settings, it always took me a bit to get used to role vs roll side of the bell. I also have a tendency to be a rules lawyer, I learned to not argue with gm, but that was hard.

there is another thing. pbp games lean to role. irc and in person games tend to be more flexible.

[Naaman]

I tend not to like role play, as I feel like it can get a little silly after a minute or so.

As I've played more games, I have migrated to almost playing in 3rd person.

My life experience has taugjt me that the rolling should always trump the role play, especially when the character is an expert at something that neither the player or GM is... the tactics skill and various repair skills come to mind: kowing what it takes to achieve a certain effect (raw materials, manpower, equipment, etc) changes the way I interpret a GM's handling of certain scenarios.

In any case, I feel that beyond the player speaking as the character (not necessarily "in character") role play is overrated, but for those who like it and enjoy it, a certainly can boost the overall fun for all involved.

This is also why I am so interested in finding ways to modify the rules to help express variations between characters: functionally, there is no real difderence in a cinematic figjt between a heavy blaster pistol (5D) and a blaster rifle (5D). But I feel like if a party consists of a rebel infantryman and a fugitive gunslinger, there should be a rules-based difference in how their weapons are expressed mechanically anx in what the characters can do with them in the actual fight. Calll me crunchy, but that's how I roll

[Dredwulf60]

This came up a bit in a conversation I had with 'Shooting womp rats' a little while ago. Whereas he prefers a cinematic style that omits all of the tedious details, such as getting from place to place, unless there is a good scene payoff to it, I prefer to play out the travel where practical.

In my opinion and experience, It's easy for the GM to say 'You've trekked through the jungle for 6 hours, and now you've come to your destination...(insert descriptive text).

But unless you've got a certain brand of attentive and imaginative players, they won't really appreciate the 6 hour trek through the jungle. It's come and gone like a wipe-transition. Are they tired from the walk? Hungry? Have bugs been eating at them? How many wet areas have they had to wade through? What has the wet and damp done to their weapons and equipment readiness?

Even if it's something as simple as using up 15 minutes of playtime having the group make various rolls... Perception checks to look for ambushes, stamina checks to overcome the fatigue of hacking through the thick brush, Jungle survival rolls to help keep the wildlife at bay...Weapons and equipment rolls to make sure they hold their blaster rifles over their heads as they wade through the chest-deep marsh...

Describing these things is a nice step, but the rolls give you concrete results that can really help shape the perception of what the characters are going through.

Roll a complication on the dex check to wade the river?....the character trips and get totally doused. Low roll on the survival? Blood sucking insects infest the character. Make a very good perception roll while looking for ambushes; the GM can describe an exotic bird the character notices.

In the end, the main thing is that the players feel like their characters have been on a bit of a trek, even if nothing really concrete comes of it.

It's like in a lot of videogames where the character goes to do something, and you are prompted to repeatedly mash the 'X' button while a bar fills up until the effect happens...like opening a rusty door.

Sure the game could have had you press the 'X' once, or even just have it open automatically when the character gets near it. But having you mash that 'X' button increases the sense of player agency; that the player is actually doing the action.

Smoke and mirrors.

[garhkal]

[Whill]

[Whill]

[garhkal]

[Dredwulf60]

First of all, thanks fellows, for indulging in this conversation. I enjoy talking 'bout this stuff.

I remember when metagame knowledge was a bane for me, but having an ongoing core group of players for many years helped to tamp it down. They knew what I would tolerate and they helped to school any newcomers.

Early on I took action to ruthlessly suppress it. It was pretty draconian of me, in retrospect, but it worked and it never became as much of a problem again. The specific problem was when other players would be giving suggestions for actions of a character...when their characters weren't there.

A little bit is okay....but it was constant and pervasive.

I got so sick of saying "Be quiet, you aren't there." And my players knew that they could blurt out what they wanted to say...and when it was out mission accomplished, then they could just say sorry and wait for the next time they needed to blurt something 'helpful' again.

Many might say, "What's the big deal?" But sometimes you want solitary players to actually be able to decide things on their own...otherwise every single decision becomes a committee decision. Especially when the decision is something that a character would probably do...except the player doesn't see where it might have negative consequences further down the road, or when it should be something like an emotionally driven reaction.

My heavy-handed decision?

GM fiat: "Thou shalt not take action suggested by the table-talk." In practice: I would disallow a character to take any action that was suggested by another player from across the table...who didn't have a character present in the scene.

We'd get results like:

Player 1:"I think I'm going to shoot this guy. I pull out my blaster..."

Player-not-at-scene: "Hey...don't shoot him...use the stun setting and just knock him out.

"Player 1: "Oh, thanks. I was GOING to stun him...but now that you said that, I can't."

Rest of the group: "Way to go, Player-not-at-scene..."


A few months of that rule in effect, like 20 years ago, and I have never had to enforce it again.


We had one player though, who often tried to circumvent metagame knowledge by asking VERY specific questions in order for his character to get the information that he thought he should be party to.

In one D&D game, two characters from the group went to investigate a tower for danger while the rest camped out and healed nearby. They soon found that the tower was inhabited by a friendly wizard who brought them in for hospitality. Fed them well, gave them beautiful servant girls to see to their comfort...all in all they had a great time.

Until the spell wore off and they found that the great food was nothing but molding bread with excrement and the servant girls were zombies enslaved to the necromancer. Suffice they got free and they decided not to share certain parts of the experience with the others out of personal embarrassment. Of course everyone at the table knew what had happened...but the other characters did not.

Soon as they got back, AL, the player I'm talking about has his character ask:
AL "Hey, what happened in the tower?"
Other players: "Aww..Nothing much. Just some crazy old man."
AL: "Hm. You guys didn't get hungry or anything? Did you guys stay for dinner?"

Other players: "Uhhh...no. Why?"

AL: "Well...you guys were gone for a while. I thought maybe you might have had company or something. You didn't see any zombie girls or anything?"

Other players: "Nope. Nothing like that."

AL: "Are you sure? Because you could tell me if something happened in that tower..."


We came to call this the 'AL effect' because it was typical for this player.

[garhkal]

[Naaman]

LOL! "Question time."

I think the metagame issue is really just a question of player maturity combined with the player's motivation for even playing the game.

Kinda like how some players are "looters." In our games, we occasionally had a player who thought (probably based on PC games) that he had to actually kill a bad guy to get character points. So, even if another character dealt a mortal wound or incapacitated result, he would run over and "kill" the unconscious stormie to be sure of collecting the "XP." And then he would loot the body and try to sell everything he found.

I piped up as another player, not being the GM: "Dude, if he's unconscious, he's defeated. You can still get the CPs." And then we moved on and our game flowed much more nicely.

I think that metagamers are after something like that (it may even be the "extra" CPs they think they will earn by solving the mystery or whatever). It may just be that they want the "prestige" of having figured something out "ahead of schedule" thus giving them the "advantage" in the story line... or something . In my case, my role- vs. roll-playing vices are two: hack and slash and min-maxing (not to be confused with power gaming ).

[Tinman]

I don't tend to view it as a spectrum, so much as two primary elements of RPGs which work together on different levels. We've always regarded game mechanics as the basic framework of the game, keeping everything internally consistent. The randomness of it can create interesting surprises and changes of direction in games, for both the players and GM. It maintains a sense that very unlikely things are still possible, that degrees of real risk exist, and of "the future always being in motion." It can create those "wow, alright, nobody expected that.. including the GM" moments which can be really entertaining or even thought provoking. Sometimes that's created circumstances which even took plots in eerily dramatic directions with a life of their own, evoking the "spirit of Kreia." ("..as one trained in the Force, you know that true coincidences are rare.")

On the other hand, role playing actually gives vision to that internally consistent world, allowing the players and GM to express character personalities in a way which includes drama and theme. Some things are resolved with role playing, sometimes with unexpected brilliance in a way which makes sense for the character in question. Finding that your character isn't able to get the door to open is one thing, but considering how likely he is to get frustrated and blast the thing is another. It can also give meaning to mechanics in terms of a character's story. Using character points to gain a Force power which allows one to absorb and dissipate energy is one thing, but the first time the character uses it the player can do a momentary flashback of a lesson from his deceased Master sparking the intuition that the Force can be used in that way, resulting in a heroic moment. (Couple that with a single candle and a simple prayer in the cultural tradition of that master later on, thanking him posthumously, and you have something really special.)

[Dredwulf60]

[The Bissler]

Excellent discussion!

In short, in situations where a player is roleplaying as well as roll playing, I tend to weight the roll according to the roleplaying.

For example, I had one PC clad in an Imperial Officer's uniform a few weeks ago who wandered into an engineering section and suddenly commanded the engineers to attention. He then proceeded to start drilling them as to what to do in a whole variety of situations including a hyperdrive leak.

The roleplaying was so convincing (and entertaining for all of us) that I eased the difficulty of the roll and he was successful while other Stormtrooper armour clad PCs went about sabotaging the ship's systems.

Equally, if he had really messed up the role-play I would have made the difficulty harder.

What I like about this approach is that while the eventual result will rule the day, good roleplaying should be rewarded (or punished if the opposite is true). I think this is helpful also for avoiding situations such as where certain PCs know they have a good Bargain skill and just want to roll rather than role-play the situation at all. For me, the more PCs acting in character the better!