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By serious, I mean everyone in the campaign tried to create a character that fit the setting and made an effort to roleplay consistently. I have always wanted to try this, but in my experience there is almost always at least one player who creates a silly character, like a monk or a wizard named Bob, while everyone else has characters with medieval fantasy style names, and many times that character ends up being a significant distraction or even derails large portions of the game.

Now, by saying this, I do not have a problem with silly games (probably over 50% of the campaigns I've played in have some silliness involved) and am not trying to make it sound like one style of play is better than the other. I've played in sillier games and enjoyed them, but at some point I thought it might be interesting to play a game like D&D in a style that is a bit more King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and less Monty Python and the Holy Grail, if that makes sense. Is there a way to do this gracefully without excluding players or dictating other people's character concepts too much? From what I've seen, players who tend to pick more serious characters rarely have issues when the group decides to do some lighthearted character concepts, but I've also seen players who always play silly characters tend to end up just playing Bob the wizard in disguise if they end up getting involved in a more serious game, and the game ends up not working very well.

So, how many of you have played in a more serious style RPG campaign, were you able to keep all the players involved, and was it worth it? Or do you think it's just a waste of time and always embrace the silliness?

As someone who plays with a couple of different groups that do things almost exclusively this way (aside from the odd lighthearted/comedic oneshot games) I'd say it's absolutely worth it, even though such a game pretty much inherently requires a greater level of investment (especially on the DM side) to get the most out of it. As a form of storytelling, an RPG campaign in which everyone stays true to well-developed characters, are not afraid to emotionally invest and are willing to commit to truly roleplaying, it's almost unique, and the payoffs can be incredible.

I think the key to it is making it very clear from the start to any potential players exactly what this sort of campaign is going to be offering them. If you have people that only want to do the MMO loop of find place>murderise its inhabitants>take their stuff>repeat, or spend their time making off-topic jokes and having a character that changes from week to week, dragging them kicking and screaming into your group's own answer to Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones is a surefire way to make sure no one has fun, so it's better to make it clear upfront what to expect. This sort of game is not for everyone, but it doesn't have to be. If you and your players want a serious narrative, character-driven game that can go for hours and sessions between combat or puzzles, the Bob The Wizard player isn't going to get anything out of it anyway, so it's not necessarily exclusionary to set this stuff out up front, it simply means people know what they're signing up for and can choose if it's for them or not.

If you're thinking of DMing something like this, you probably should be willing to put in a little more legwork than a more casual game. Even if you're not making a setting from scratch, it's still going to (probably) fall to you to act as 'keeper of the lore'; you're the one that's going to have to check everyone's backstories line up with the locations, cultures and history of the world, and answer questions with some degree of accuracy when players ask you about these things. On the other hand, it's worth it for those moments when you can drop a name or a place and give your players that moment of realisation as the world around them becomes that bit more tangible; they come to the site of an ancient battle that up till now was just a name on a map, or realise they're coming face to face with a character whose deeds are legendary.

On the flipside from what to expect from the game, there's also the matter of what's expected on the part of the players, and honestly, I think this is less of a hurdle than a lot of people think when they imagine this kind of game. You don't need to be a method actor of Oscar-winning calibre to commit to a specific role for a few hours a week, you don't need to talk only in Chaucer's English just because it's a medieval game or write a novel explaining your character's history up to the present. All that is really expected from players in a game like this is a willingness to put a little thought and effort into things beyond 'my name is Glen and I'm here to... I dunno, kill a dragon or something because I was... er.... an orphan or something'.

A little effort coming up with a history for your character that respects the setting and explains who they are today, a commitment to play in character (which doesn't mean you need a flawless accent or verbal pattern, just an awareness that they and you are different things and make decisions accordingly), and and willingness to emotionally invest in the game will go a hell of a long way. You don't need to be Critical Role from day 1 to have a good time in a narrative, character-driven, 'serious' game. If you do end up with a player that doesn't 'get it', so to speak, it's entirely possible this sort of game just isn't for them, and that is a conversation that should probably happen sooner rather than later, as in a game like this one player who's not willing to engage can spoil it for everyone.

I'd also add that 'serious' doesn't mean it's all edgey brooding and Shakespearean monologues all the time. By its very nature as an improvised story, even the most hardened roleplayers and the most committed DMs will have their games descend into hilarity from time to time, because the nature of D&D means absurd things happen. In a game like this, it's perfectly feasible that in the space of a couple of hours you'll go from laughing at an attempt to infiltrate a town with the false persona 'fart McDuff' to crying over the tragically ironic and narratively appropriate death of your warlock at the hands of a demon he hubristically summoned (true story from a few months ago...) All that makes a difference here is having a little restraint to know when to hold back on the comedy and let serious things be serious from time to time.


So to summarise what is probably a bit too much waffle, yes, it's absolutely worthwhile. I couldn't really see myself playing RPGs any other way to be honest, and if you can get a group together who are all on the same page regarding what sort of game you're putting together, it'll be a totally unique and special thing. It won't be for everyone, and you might find you end up playing with a smaller, more committed group rather than a larger, more casual one, but if you try and it doesn't work, it can easily pivot back towards a sillier, less intense game.

'Serious' is the norm as far as I'm concerned. Silly moments happen, but I've never seen a 'Bob the Wizard' outside one shots at Cons or charity events. [Or Toon or Paranoia, games that are naturally very silly]


Well, one exception, I joined a 4th edition D&D campaign a little late, and was surprised to find no role-playing whatsoever. It was, as the game rules encouraged, a fiddly combat sim (Warhammer Quest-lite with more tokens and less depth), and we switched characters out often when we got bored of the limited mechanics. It was a weird experience, and the group experience didn't do much to convince me that 4e was a worthwhile RPG.

I've generally had a mixture. Everyone starts out with silly or over the top characters, with crazy backstories like being frat bros at wizard college, or the pixie fairy that lives on the back of the brain dead ogre, or Garagorn and Legoless which are blatant clones. Then, the sessions happen, the character's personalities emerge, some of them die horribly, and the survivors mature and morph beyond their cheap gimmick. That boozehound of a wizard is now a paranoid guy stockpiling magic in a survivalist tower, bankrolling adventuring parties of noobs because he doesn't think it's safe to adventure.

I guess, kind of like a Pixar movie, or Steven Universe. You start out with a fat kid mad that he can't eat his favorite ice cream, and end up negotiating with the fate of the world at stake, in a journey that no one who wasn't on it with you would believe.

It's part of the DMs job to set the stage. And that means getting everyone on board for the correct tone. If someone staunchly refuses to be a part of the group they probably shouldn't be a part of that group.

Jokes and hilarity are a part of any game. But if that comes from funny circumstance or fart jokes is up to the DMs tone and the players.

Have to say 90%+ of our campaigns have been of the more serious variety.

Loads of in -jokes/recurring gags -- recent ones being about how surprisingly common the name Imhotep is.

But TBF we tend to design our characters with the Gm or ahve them sort of handed/described to us beforehand.

Depends on your definition of serious.

The longest running game I played was a Dresden Files campaign which I played pretty much every week for four years whilst I was studying at university. Over the course of that campaign the PCs included Francis the Ex-IRA-turned-mafia-getaway-driver-turned-holy-warrior (my character, whose turn into a holy warrior was not pre-planned but came about naturally over the course of the game as a reaction to events), closeted-werebear-mafioso (initially my boss, later became head of the mafia when the player left), the scion of Thor (wielded Mjolnir as a wizard focus and had Thor, voiced by Brian Blessed, talking to him in his head), a changeling who slowly unlocked their fey powers and eventually became a winged unicorn, an ex-agent from a "secret government agency" tracking "aliens" who was revealed to be the harbinger of the coming of a great spider being from beyond reality, a friendly neighbourhood pawnshop owner with unresolved guilt over the death of the previous shop owner and initially unrealised magical powers based around magnetism, earth and gravity, A frankenstein's monster inhabited by a hive mind, an emotional vampire who fed on love but is harmed by true love, a vampire hunter descended from Van Helsing (later left to hunt vampires in their home country), a detective who received visions of the future but is unable to persuade anybody about them.

Quite an eclectic cast but they all fitted perfectly into the world of the Dresden files. There were often silly events in the game but they were never a result of people just being silly, they just ended up that way due to the world and the characters.

One example: Francis and werebear are trying to interrogate a prisoner to find out who has been getting the mafia's family members hooked on vampire saliva, turning them into thralls. In order to keep our identities secret we are wearing rubber masks of ex-presidents (point break reference inserted by me). The werebear decides that they are going to transform in front of the prisoner to terrify them into talking. Sure, that's a pretty good plan. But they forget to take the mask off first. Cue hilarity as the bear is trying to tear this mask off its face before it is suffocated by the stretched rubber.

Some settings are much easier to include a variety of different character types in. A historical setting is much more constrained in the types of characters that "fit" in a band of adventurers or knights or whatever, for example. It would be incredibly strange for there to be a black man running around Arthurian Britain, slightly less strange (but still pretty strange based on the mythology) for a woman knight, etc.

Voss wrote:

Well, one exception, I joined a 4th edition D&D campaign a little late, and was surprised to find no role-playing whatsoever. It was, as the game rules encouraged, a fiddly combat sim (Warhammer Quest-lite with more tokens and less depth), and we switched characters out often when we got bored of the limited mechanics. It was a weird experience, and the group experience didn't do much to convince me that 4e was a worthwhile RPG.

This is definitely a "your group" problem and not a system problem.

I definitely prefer a serious game. I can totally handle a "bob" in my groups every now and then, but I just will not make any more effort toward that character than they are making toward my setting. But the majority of my games have always had all the players playing in character and with real, developed ideas about their characters. Very rarely we do go totally silly, or someone will run a barbarian called Kevin Facekiller, but even then we will usually end up learning what motivates Keven to Kill Face.

One of my favourite campaigns that I’ve run was set in Ravenloft, which is DND’s survival horror setting. Serious, tense, and generally a lot of “fun” for all involved.

I specifically did NOT invite my one friend, that liked to play characters such as a dog with an arm growing out of its back. Sometimes you’ve got to pick your players to get the game you want to play.

 streamdragon wrote:

Voss wrote:

Well, one exception, I joined a 4th edition D&D campaign a little late, and was surprised to find no role-playing whatsoever. It was, as the game rules encouraged, a fiddly combat sim (Warhammer Quest-lite with more tokens and less depth), and we switched characters out often when we got bored of the limited mechanics. It was a weird experience, and the group experience didn't do much to convince me that 4e was a worthwhile RPG.

This is definitely a "your group" problem and not a system problem.

It was actually both. The group was horrid, but the system was deeply flawed for an RPG. Even as a one-shot beer and pretzel game it was pretty bad and inferior to other things on the market (or games long past, like Warhammer Quest). Lots of little chits and tracking trivial bonuses and poking models a square or two multiple times a round. The feel of D&D was replaced with a bad superpowers game where the 'powers' were uninteresting and unimpressive, and nothing in the world could move or develop without the PCs interacting with it.
It had a few good ideas (I liked healing surges for keeping the game moving along, for example) but the implementation was amazingly bad and tone deaf in relation to their market (where a lot of bridges were burned and customers kicked out to find a replacement... conveniently they had just ripped Dungeon and Dragon away from Paizo and made them seem like fellow victims and made a competitor over night, fit to purpose).

Given how quickly they killed the line (and failed to fix it with hasty revisions (Essentials), which they killed even more quickly), and abandoned almost every 4e design decision when 5e came around in favor of a weird mix of 2nd and 3rd, it seems pretty obvious that even the designers felt they had screwed up the game. Well, the remaining designers anyway. WotC purged their D&D staff pretty heavily, with pink slips (firings) each Christmas without fail every year 4e lasted.

Most of the games I've played have been 'serious'. I tend to play darker games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Call Of Cthulhu, and silly characters just ruin them. Not that we don't have moments of levity...

Voss wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:

Voss wrote:

Well, one exception, I joined a 4th edition D&D campaign a little late, and was surprised to find no role-playing whatsoever. It was, as the game rules encouraged, a fiddly combat sim (Warhammer Quest-lite with more tokens and less depth), and we switched characters out often when we got bored of the limited mechanics. It was a weird experience, and the group experience didn't do much to convince me that 4e was a worthwhile RPG.

This is definitely a "your group" problem and not a system problem.

It was actually both. The group was horrid, but the system was deeply flawed for an RPG. Even as a one-shot beer and pretzel game it was pretty bad and inferior to other things on the market (or games long past, like Warhammer Quest). Lots of little chits and tracking trivial bonuses and poking models a square or two multiple times a round. The feel of D&D was replaced with a bad superpowers game where the 'powers' were uninteresting and unimpressive, and nothing in the world could move or develop without the PCs interacting with it.
It had a few good ideas (I liked healing surges for keeping the game moving along, for example) but the implementation was amazingly bad and tone deaf in relation to their market (where a lot of bridges were burned and customers kicked out to find a replacement... conveniently they had just ripped Dungeon and Dragon away from Paizo and made them seem like fellow victims and made a competitor over night, fit to purpose).

Given how quickly they killed the line (and failed to fix it with hasty revisions (Essentials), which they killed even more quickly), and abandoned almost every 4e design decision when 5e came around in favor of a weird mix of 2nd and 3rd, it seems pretty obvious that even the designers felt they had screwed up the game. Well, the remaining designers anyway. WotC purged their D&D staff pretty heavily, with pink slips (firings) each Christmas without fail every year 4e lasted.

Agreed I played a few sessions of 4e and it felt more like a complicated board game than a Roleplaying game, especially because my GM was obsessed with the miniature aspect of Roleplaying.

Voss wrote:It was actually both. The group was horrid, but the system was deeply flawed for an RPG.

No, it really wasn't. It was 100% the group you were in and the fact that you went into sales numbers and crap completely unrelated to your particular game sessions sort of showcases your lack of argument.

Adrassil wrote:
Agreed I played a few sessions of 4e and it felt more like a complicated board game than a Roleplaying game, especially because my GM was obsessed with the miniature aspect of Roleplaying.

Miniatures are not unique to 4e. People act like 4e forced miniatures onto games, when they made that switch BECAUSE so many people played, no PLAY, 3.pf WITH miniatures. If your GM couldn't get past the minis to focus on actual role play, that's on your group.


But as long as we're all trading anecdotes, my group played 4e from day 1 and had a ton of actual story focused and driven games, including multiple hour sessions with plenty of dice rolling and social situations (including a few social skill challenges) without ever seeing combat.


How a game session plays out is 100% on the people involved. You can have the most combat heavy game of a nearly all social game, or a completely social session of Rifts if you wanted. It's 100% on the players and the DM/GM.

I'm a massive 4e fan. It got me into ttrpgs in general, and I ran games of it for years during high school and college.

The system supported theatre of the mind and heavy roleplay but it certainly didn't encourage it. In fact, the most "serious" game of dnd I have participated in was a 4e game where my players got super into their characters, and roleplayed their way through a small village and robbed the mayor.

Most of my games end up devolving into meme games no matter how serious it starts out. We started as concerned ravnican guild members thrown together by chance and trapped in the undercity, and ended up as drug dealers after failing a nature check and ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, then capitalizing on the business opportunity.

Getting in on a "serious" game is something that interests me, but I'm generally held back from putting my foot out because I still feel inexperienced. My campaigns so far have mostly been laid back, "lets follow the campaign and relax" games where no one is really lazy, but we're also clearly not trying super hard to be "in character" and fleshing the roles we play out in any meaningful way.

It is fun but I definitely can feel the difference between the game I'm experiencing and how I've seen players play in the past. I think once I finish my current campaigns I'll seek one out and give it my best shot though.

Just remember that you can be totally serious and roleplay without feeling the need to "act" and do mannerisms and accents and so on. That might take some of the pressure off you!

I don't think I'll ever do voices or mannerisms. Too much work and would make me feel too silly to keep a straight face. Though I am currently possessed and decided to add "my good chum(s)" at the end of every sentence for a laugh.

balmong7 wrote:
The system supported theatre of the mind and heavy roleplay but it certainly didn't encourage it

Not as much, perhaps, as something like Genesys or any of the narrative heavy game systems, sure. But it did provide systems to make non-combat encounters, which was something new to D&D as a whole. I know this sounds crazy, but players also retained the ability to role-play it out the way they did in literally every version of D&D before and since.


I'm torn on voices and mannerisms a bit. When I'm playing at the table it's somehow easier for players to keep track of important NPCs by name, but when we play online via Discord or Roll20 or whatever, NPCs quickly blend together into "who was that again?" Voices or at least mannerisms might make that easier to keep apart. We're doing a Legend of the Five Rings game right now, and so without handouts, I would have no ability to remember who any character is.

 streamdragon wrote:
I know this sounds crazy, but players also retained the ability to role-play it out the way they did in literally every version of D&D before and since.

This. I really don't get the argument that certain systems encourage or discourage roleplay. That's all down to the people playing, really. I recently ran a Lasers And Feelings oneshot (a really rather excellent sci-fi parody game) for my D&D group and despite the game only having a single resolution mechanics for everything, the nature of the roleplaying was no different to our regular 5e game. Sure, the rules might emphasise one thing over the other, but that's not prescriptive as to how you actually go about playing the game.

I'm torn on voices and mannerisms a bit. When I'm playing at the table it's somehow easier for players to keep track of important NPCs by name, but when we play online via Discord or Roll20 or whatever, NPCs quickly blend together into "who was that again?" Voices or at least mannerisms might make that easier to keep apart. We're doing a Legend of the Five Rings game right now, and so without handouts, I would have no ability to remember who any character is.

I always go voices just because I find it a fun part of the experience, but another DM I play with very rarely does, and his games are just as immersive. His accent might change and he rarely does any physical performance, but just the changes in tempo, speech patterns, pitch are enough to keep characters plenty distinct enough. I'm always one to encourage full in-character roleplaying if people are comfortable with it just as that's how I have the most fun, but not doing it is absolutely no barrier to running an immersive, exciting game in my experience.

I broadly agree, but I did find that at higher levels combats took a lot longer to resolve in 4e and therefore took up more of the session time, mostly due to the interplay between scaling bonuses for attack and defense and the amount of HP stuff had. We had a fight with a Dracolich that just dragged on for an intermiable amount of time, and it was what convinced us to move our campaign over to Pathfinder for the last few levels. I heard they fixed that with some of the later monster supplements and stuff.

Anyway. Enough tedious edition war stuff.

I agree about voices being useful in online play. I really missed the physical aspect of roleplaying when I ran online for a few years.

Paradigm wrote:
I always go voices just because I find it a fun part of the experience, but another DM I play with very rarely does, and his games are just as immersive. His accent might change and he rarely does any physical performance, but just the changes in tempo, speech patterns, pitch are enough to keep characters plenty distinct enough. I'm always one to encourage full in-character roleplaying if people are comfortable with it just as that's how I have the most fun, but not doing it is absolutely no barrier to running an immersive, exciting game in my experience.

I tried to do voices for a Genesys game I ran in the World of SMOG and it went ... poorly. Now part of that is World of SMOG is set in a steampunk shadowrun version of Victorian London and my English accent is up there with Keanu Reeves...

Da Boss wrote:I broadly agree, but I did find that at higher levels combats took a lot longer to resolve in 4e and therefore took up more of the session time, mostly due to the interplay between scaling bonuses for attack and defense and the amount of HP stuff had. We had a fight with a Dracolich that just dragged on for an intermiable amount of time, and it was what convinced us to move our campaign over to Pathfinder for the last few levels. I heard they fixed that with some of the later monster supplements and stuff.

Anyway. Enough tedious edition war stuff.

I agree about voices being useful in online play. I really missed the physical aspect of roleplaying when I ran online for a few years.

I cannot argue 4e combat being long, but that's another system resolvable issue that really isn't worth getting into.

Honestly having run with my regular group for so long in person in high school/college, moving to online has been a nice way to keep in touch and all that, but it's really just not the same at all. I have two online groups and one regular group. I've known the online people for decades, and the regular in-person group for months. I would rather play with the in-person group any day, because sitting around an actual table and rolling actual dice is just so much better.

I'm a voices guy, and I enjoy doing it. Trouble is remembering which voice / accent / oddity went with which character sometimes.

Serious is one of those nebulous terms. For me, if the subject matter is serious, then it tends to be serious. But everyone likes a joke, and that's going to happen too. It can be good to split the tension.

I can recall playing a parody of a character in a campaign once, but I played it "seriously" like I felt the character would. All the unlikely and 4th wall humorous bits were enjoyed by the players, but the characters themselves were often unaware of the joke / setup that was occurring, and we played it that way.

(I was the cousin of Cadian Lukas Bastonne, with the same equipment and such. Different psychoses... but basically the lesser known cousin of someone famous. "Hey, are you related to Lukas Bastonne? He's amazing!")

 streamdragon wrote:

Voss wrote:It was actually both. The group was horrid, but the system was deeply flawed for an RPG.

No, it really wasn't. It was 100% the group you were in and the fact that you went into sales numbers and crap completely unrelated to your particular game sessions sort of showcases your lack of argument.

Adrassil wrote:
Agreed I played a few sessions of 4e and it felt more like a complicated board game than a Roleplaying game, especially because my GM was obsessed with the miniature aspect of Roleplaying.

Miniatures are not unique to 4e. People act like 4e forced miniatures onto games, when they made that switch BECAUSE so many people played, no PLAY, 3.pf WITH miniatures. If your GM couldn't get past the minis to focus on actual role play, that's on your group.


But as long as we're all trading anecdotes, my group played 4e from day 1 and had a ton of actual story focused and driven games, including multiple hour sessions with plenty of dice rolling and social situations (including a few social skill challenges) without ever seeing combat.


How a game session plays out is 100% on the people involved. You can have the most combat heavy game of a nearly all social game, or a completely social session of Rifts if you wanted. It's 100% on the players and the DM/GM.

Good for you. And I'm aware miniatures AREN'T unique to 4e but my group usually has a lot of RP and our GM usually gives us a lot of Role-playing opportunities he GM'd a great Mass Effect games with miniatures before that. In this case it wasn't my group but the system seemed to suck us into a void of combat after combat. My Dark Heresy campaign had a lot of RPing It can be more 'than just the group' I had one session in 5e and that had more RPing in it than the several in 4. Yes I know any system can be used well but some lend well to other styles of games than others and 4e to me just felt like playing an MMORPG to me. You like it good! I'm not a big fan myself.

Edit: nevermind, not worth it.

 streamdragon wrote:
Edit: nevermind, not worth it.

Yeah, well, agree to disagree and all that. We've derailed this thread enough already. A lot of people don't like the P&P RPG systems I like but they like and dislike what they like.

Back on topic. I...don't think I've had that experience too badly, to me the humour seems to go hand in hand, in my Rogue Trader session as the GM I was making quirky characters left and right, but they seemed to fit. One of the PCs got all hung up, he became strangely bigotted to an NPC because he had never seen a bird in his life (They were on a space station) and I just rolled with it. But they take seriously the parts which need to be taken seriously. I did get frustrated with a PC in a game I was in because the character they RP'd was incredibly stupid and did incredibly stupid then, but that wasn't for humour's sake.

But I feel for you man, some of my favourite moments in Roleplaying are serious parts. Perhaps find another group?

Good luck!

The encourage/discourage is based on what the games mechanics are rewarding you for doing.

DnD without house rules does not reward you for playing your character well. Or having flaws. Or doing anything other than killing monsters and taking all their stuff. Your every metric for improvement is based on getting better at killing things.

EVen when 4th gave a measurable way to handle social encounters it was just turning talking into a form of combat.

You are not rewarded for finding a way to avoid the monsters. You are not rewarded for exceptional ingenuity when handling delicate social situations. Your just rewarded for the body count.

Yes, you are CAPABLE of role playing anyway. But the mechanics clearly don't care one way or the other if you do.

 Lance845 wrote:
DnD without house rules does not reward you for playing your character well. Or having flaws.

I'm pretty sure the DMG has several proposed mechanics for encouraging and rewarding roleplay.

I see this criticism a lot (not just in DnD but in a lot of RPGs) that roleplay isn't adequately encouraged and rewarded, but even from my limited experience, it seems to me like effective and rewarding roleplay is really something that comes out of the group itself and its creativity. Trying to tie that too down into mechanics feels like it would just produce really flat characters and even clunkier mechanics. Making encounters that reward non-combat and inventive solutions feels like something the GM really needs to be involved in, because that kind of stuff is inherently so open-ended that trying to encapsulate it in mechanical rules feels like time and effort that will just slow things down.

I agree that the mechanics don't care one way or the other, but I'd suggest that's not inherently bad. Leaving that system completely open-ended makes it easier for the group/session/GM/whoever to figure this stuff out in a way that works for what's going on... Or to just ignore it and go kill gak if that's what the group really wants.

 Lance845 wrote:
The encourage/discourage is based on what the games mechanics are rewarding you for doing.

DnD without house rules does not reward you for playing your character well. Or having flaws. Or doing anything other than killing monsters and taking all their stuff. Your every metric for improvement is based on getting better at killing things.

I'd posit that if you're looking for some form of mechanical advancement from playing your character appropriately, you're kind of missing the point of roleplaying. Surely you're either already willing to engage with it, because that's what you're playing an RPG for, or you don't care and any amount of mechanical incentives aren't going to get you to actually enjoy it. If you are there to tell a story and experience playing a flawed, nuanced character, you're going to do that whether the rules reward you for it or not (and odds are that sort of game will use Milestone progression anyway), and if you aren't interested in that, getting some token XP for talking to a character before you murder and loot them is hardly going to add to your experience.

This isn't to say that one way is right or wrong, just that whichever way one prefers to play, they're probably already doing with or without any mechanical incentive. Making a social situation a more complex game of checks and skills and dice rolls is just going to frustrate the people who just want to talk it through in character, while for the murder-hobos it makes the part of the game they likely don't care about moderately more bearable.

You are not rewarded for finding a way to avoid the monsters. You are not rewarded for exceptional ingenuity when handling delicate social situations. Your just rewarded for the body count.

This is really a matter of encounter design at the table, and the DM's craft. The 'reward' for avoiding monsters is that they don't kill you, or you don't have to waste resources on them so you're in better shape for the next encounter. The reward for social excellence is found in how that affects proceedings. Perhaps you gain some new information, or foil someone's attempted lying, or acquire an ally that will come to your aid later.

Again, these things might not be of use if you're just chasing XP, loot and progression, but if that's your focus then you're probably not interested in what these NPCs have to say anyway.


This has drifted quite a way from the OP though, so while it's an interesting discussion (not so much the edition war stuff, but the roleplaying/mechanics relationship) , should we perhaps take it over to the general D&D thread?

I am out getting breakfast atm but i will make a new thread later when i get home to talk, not about dnd specifically, but rpg mechanics and their impact at the table.