Roleplaying is it's own reward.
Chasing after mechanical effects is not roleplaying. It's forcing this bland stereotype "ideal" into every situation until one is rewarded with inspiration. Then they forget about any RP until they've used that inspiration and need to "earn" it again.
I (suspect) not every table devolves into that. But that is the social pressures this rule pushes people towards. Why do that? If people like to roleplay, they'll do it. Given an environment that is conducive and not punishing to RP and it will occur, naturally. I'm personally not much of a voice/acting type roleplayer. But, I do strongly like to be "lost in them moment" to "live in the fantasy world" and not meta-game or break the fourth wall. All these things are conducive to roleplaying. Whereas yelling across table you're at 3 hitpoints and need healing, or mentioning in every other sentence cause you're CE you steal from party or kill baby orcs, or whatever other infantile idea you have of what "evil" means. [ranty aside cause I'm in ranty mood: real evil would make the game so dark and distasteful, few would enjoy playing it].
Punishment (negative reinforcement if you want to pretend to be PC) is far less prone to unintended consequences than reward systems and seems more effective in my experience. Or, possibly, I'm just a dick.
The Furies
Players (not characters) earn a Fury token every time they:
- directly mention a game stat; Hit Points Alignment, Ability Score, class ability Spell slots, levels, XP, etc
- cheezily attempt to circumvent above by saying shit like "I feel like I'm at 1/2 my regular health"
- other actions deemed by Referee or Player as "meta-gaming" or "breaking the fourth wall" (perhaps only repeated occurrence after 1st warning & explanation)
Exceptions for direct responses to Referees questions, explicit rules questions/clarifications.
Unlike Inspiration, Furies accumulate. The Referee may take back a Fury at any time to give character player is controlling disadvantage [roll 2 d20 take worst result].
Players will fucking hate this. So much, I'm sure that I will soon not have cause to pass out Furies. The table will shift from "game talk" to "in character talk". People will feel comfortable roleplaying if they want. And some might even fall into it without realizing. Ideally, play emphasis will shift from mechanics, fighting, accumulation of more mechanical benefits to "adventure" and pursuing in character desires. At least a Referee can dream.
We made players hold up their hand with two fingers to talk out of character, everything else was in character. It actually worked because the DM would screw you if you talked out of character with otu doing this by making npcs react to waht you are saying
ReplyDeleteI like that.
DeletePendragon has an Inspiration-like mechanic with its Passions, and has had it for about 30 years. It's still considered one of the best games for roleplaying to come along. In my experience, it did, indeed, inspire (sorry) roleplaying.
ReplyDeleteJust in case you're curious to see what I'm talking about:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendragon_%28role-playing_game%29#Passions
"They inhibit actual roleplaying and have everyone instead doing all sorts of unintended consequences just to get the reward. Getting even farther out of character and into meta-game land."
ReplyDeleteOr... they wouldn't because not everyone is going to react that way to them? I kind of think they are awesome. People who like to RP can get a little bump here and there. And those points can be passed between players for doing things they think are good rping, or just interesting or cool and helping the story along. By the same token, if players are acting out of character, being disruptive and doing things just to get points then they shouldn't be getting them from the GM...
"play emphasis will shift from mechanics, fighting, accumulation of more mechanical benefits to "adventure" and pursuing in character desires."
Or... people will not play in a game with a GM like that. Which I guess would be okay with you so no loss but still. I'd like a bit less chatter and more gaming at my table, sure... but rules like that would just piss me the fuck off.
Punishment isn't less likely to have unintended consequences... it just has different unintended consequences.
What makes it different from a lot other mechanics in the game? I mean, some players are going to try and maximize the mechanical benefits of the rules, others won't care. I've been playing a D&D 5th game for about two months now and the DM has awarded inspiration twice. Neither has been used and the table as a whole pretty much forgets it is there. Heck, even the really heavy min-max player at the table hasn't bothered with it. Mostly, I bet, because it's such a tiny little reward that it's not really worth bothering trying to powergame around. As with most things, a good GM is the solution to solve rules lawyering. Just reward it for genuine moments and not for attempts to game the system.
ReplyDeleteI've already seen posts about how everyone should get advantage before going after dragon in recent 5ed adventure.
DeleteWhat makes it different is it's a reward, subjective reward, and biggest reward for roleplaying. Like I said roleplaying is its own reward. It also causes unintended consequences. And it makes roleplaying into a mechanic, locks people into thinking about roleplaying only within those mechanics. It's similar to feats in 3.5 vs OD&D. 3.5 feats are limiting in that if there's a feat for it you flat can't do that action without the feat, and on top of that it gets people thinking they need a feat (or other rule) to do something cool. where in OD&D where there are almost no rules and certainly no feats. Players are able and encouraged to try anything.
I intend to use inspiration, never said otherwise.
Mysefl and my gamer buddies like Inspiration. See, we never really used any sort of mechanic that prompted us to roleplay our characters. We used flaws for our 3E games (ones from RPG Nexus, not the boring ones from official rules) and we played them up ALL the time because they were fun. For example, my friend LOVES playing Daredevil scouts. Loves taking extreme risks for the glory of just looking cool and bad-ass. Now when he does stuff like that and looks good doing it, I can give him a benny or Inspiration point that he can use later on.
ReplyDeleteSame thing with myself, who tends to favor Defenders and Fighters and Paladins, looking to protect others. That's just the sort of character I gravitate towards and in the game, I'll tend to throw myself in harms way for a fellow character to take the brunt of the attack. I never received anything for doing this, but it was cool and fun and I felt like it was what my character would do. Now I get a nice little benefit for doing something I had always been doing. It's a nice little benefit in addition to "hey, that was awesome!"
And for those who are shy about really getting into character OR who just wants to meta-game, as far as I can tell when they act in character and do things that their character would do based on their background and flaws and bonds and stuff, I don't care if it's because they're looking for inspiration OR because they want to be more in character. They're doing stuff that makes sense for them in the game world and I'd reward them just the same as anyone.
Your my point.
Delete> I never received anything for doing this, but it was cool and fun and I felt like it was what my character would do.
Roleplaying happens because it is fun. People will do the things they think are fun. All game system / DM needs to do is create atmosphere where fun things are possible and encouraged.
Paying people to do things, means they will do things to get paid. They won't necessarily have fun doing them. Those that do have fun would have done them anyway. It's like MMORPG Grind, you do all this unfun stuff so you can afford to do some fun stuff. Just cut out the grind (that means cutting out any reward for grinding) and do the fun stuff.
Who's to say they're having or not having fun? Can you seriously tell me a player is acting in character just to get a benny and when they're acting in character because it's fun? IF you can, what's tomorrow's lottery numbers.
DeleteThe point is, people are acting in character. If they're consistent and good, rewarding them isn't a bad thing. I've seen this really help players who at first started off just playing for the mechanics. As they got rewarded for being more in character, they realized that being in character was fun and started to do things because of that and not for the bennies. As they progressed, you used the bennies less and less for things, reserving them for really defining moments. This only further enhanced their fun and got them more immersed.
On the flip side, I've seen players who don't like combat in D&D. They'd rather it go by fast so they can get back to the story and dialog and all that. Should I then penalize them for just going though the motions of combat? Should they receive an ultimatum that if they don't participate to the fullest of their combat potential I'll just arbitrarily kill their character or give them penalties that affect them? That seems pretty harsh to me.
Suffice to say that if I can get people in-character and role-playing, I don't care if it's because of Inspiration points or if they genuinely like role-playing. They're doing it and they're having fun and that's the up-most goal to me.