Quote from: Bill;766572Dnd has worked just fine for me for 35 years of heavy gaming.

I just don't see a reason to add mechanics for roleplay.

The best guide for roleplay is playing an rpg with roleplayers.

Great idea they should pack each starter set with 3 experienced immersive roleplayers

I guess part of this comes down to bennies/hero points etc and how comfortable you are with them.
I have been using them as part of James Bond since about 83 or so so entirely comfortable and have zero issue with them as a mechanic and have never felt they impacted roleplay negatively at all.

Quote from: Omega;766898Mainly EXP for good RPing which has been with the game since the start in one form or another.

I hate XP for RPing for two reasons:
It has no immediate impact because it gets lost in the total XP per level
For games where levels are large jumps in abilities, it makes the player levels uneven

I find immediate game rewards that keep things moving because players will want to do something worth spending their Inspiration on, which rewards everyone.

Quote from: robiswrong;766844Indeed.

As well as between "good for me" and "good for everyone".

Spot on.

Quote from: jibbajibba;766984Great idea they should pack each starter set with 3 experienced immersive roleplayers

What's the freight on 750 pounds to Singapore?

Quote from: talysman;766236I think it's a bad idea. You don't reward roleplaying, because roleplaying *is* the reward. However, if instead you give advantage to anyone who comes up with an inspired idea, that would work.

That's like saying you don't need to reward killing monsters because monster killing is its own reward.

For me, inspiration (along with the various background elements) might be the best part of 5e.  It's one of the few mechanics that doesn't feel like game.  

Want players to do certain things with their characters?  Create an in-game incentive.  That's RPG design 101.

VS

Quote from: jibbajibba;766984Great idea they should pack each starter set with 3 experienced immersive roleplayers

You must have missed my post where I said it could have value to a novice.

Edit: Just realized I actually may not have stated the above in a previous post after all; I was confusing my thoughts on CR with my thoughts on Bennies. I don't like to use either one.


But the main reason we can't include 3 immersive roleplayers is that they would suffocate in the shrink wrap.

Quote from: jibbajibba;766985I guess part of this comes down to bennies/hero points etc and how comfortable you are with them.
I have been using them as part of James Bond since about 83 or so so entirely comfortable and have zero issue with them as a mechanic and have never felt they impacted roleplay negatively at all.

It's good that it works for you, but everyone's gaming experience is different.

Just curious, are you using Top Secret? Loved that game but have not played it in a bazillion years.

Or is it a specific james bond game?

The argument about a roleplaying mechanic actually reducing roleplaying reminds me of the republicans arguing against a minimum wage because it somehow hurts workers either by teaching them that some McJob is equal to a "real job" or because the minimum is too low.  Those republicans say wages should be higher than ten bucks (or whatever) an hour, yet they refuse to put in a floor.

Inspiration and backgrounds don't stop you from raising the roleplaying bar as high as you want.  There's no ceiling.  Want more?  Keep going?  However, I believe most inspiration/background fans like the idea that there's some kind of baseline roleplaying incentive woven into the core of 5e.

Do you have to have flaws and bonds and ideals written down on your character sheet or even use them in your game?  No.  But then you don't need ability scores either.  Tabletop fantasy roleplaying can be had without them.  

VS

Quote from: Bill;767180It's good that it works for you, but everyone's gaming experience is different.

Just curious, are you using Top Secret? Loved that game but have not played it in a bazillion years.

Or is it a specific james bond game?

James bond 007 role playing from Victory games released in 82/83 I think one of the first games to use hero points as a meta mechanic to try and emulate genre conventions.

Before considering the ass-backwardness of the plan, what strikes me as silly in the first place is the self-righteous hubris of the crusaders who feel a vocation to push people to role-play the "right" way (other than which, they call not role-playing at all).

Even if you affect to spell your name with a bullet in the middle, this is not art and players are not hirelings on your set. It's a game for fun -- everyone's fun, not just a self-proclaimed elite.

If "good" rp is worth a +1 on anything, then someone consistently engaged in it should get +1 to everything all the time.

But then it wouldn't be a bone for the GM to throw, would it? And it would hardly meet the a la mode notion of 'fairness' for a good player to get such an advantage over mediocre ones.

Therefore, we need good role-playing to be scarce (or at least to short-change the really good players).

This is brilliance on par with the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

People who are good at and enjoy roleplaying their character will do so with or without an inspiration reward. Those who are not will simply come up with boilerplate routines to demonstrate their character's cowardice, greed, etc. each session. And it will all be very overt instead of naturalistic.

I don't mind a re-roll or advantage benefit once a session. Call it a fate point or a hero point. I just don't think you can coax better roleplaying out of people with a reward.

Anticipating a charge of hypocrisy, since I regard the use of that meta-game +1 as not-rp:

True, it seems to me not significantly more rp than eating a cookie Dave gave me in real life in return for my figure giving his a magic item in the game.

However, I don't privilege my preference as some kind of moral value I have a duty to try
to coerce people who don't share it into embracing. Let them play however they find fun, that's my view.

The other side is on a high horse that looks to me more like just thespian acting than like the kind of role-playing that really distinguishes an RPG from another kind of game (say, Hungry Hungry Hippos) with superfluous banter added.

Again, it's fine if that's what they want to  play. But their condescending attitude toward the whole hobby that existed before they came along? That horse was flogged to death years before the Forge zombified it.

Quote from: Phillip;767756Before considering the ass-backwardness of the plan, what strikes me as silly in the first place is the self-righteous hubris of the crusaders who feel a vocation to push people to role-play the "right" way (other than which, they call not role-playing at all).

Even if you affect to spell your name with a bullet in the middle, this is not art and players are not hirelings on your set. It's a game for fun -- everyone's fun, not just a self-proclaimed elite.

Okay, first of all, of course it's art. Roleplaying games effectively are a form of literature, crossbred with all kinds of games, social interaction and what not. That just doesn't mean it is something special, quite the contrary. Kindergarten kids who draw their parents as heads with arms and legs produce art; bored students who doodle on their work sheets produce art; a bunch of overweight guys sitting around in a room and pretend they're pirates is art. There is just nothing special about it. Something being art or not says absolutely nothing about the objective or subjective value of an activity. We are engaged in roleplaying games because we enjoy them. That is not better or worse to draw similar enjoyment from drawing churches, writing poems or knitting scarfs.
If an activity provides little to no practical purpose beyond offering enjoyment and some sort of pleasing aesthetics (which roleplaying certainly does), it qualifies as an artform. That is, however, by no means any justification of pretentious snobbery; you don't need to be a recognized connaisseur after all to enjoy this kind of activity.

Second, (and that is my personal pretentious snobbery speaking), it is outright impossible to run a game as a gamemaster without providing some sort of direction. There is a truism in pedagogics that "You cannot not educate". As a gamemaster it is your responsibility to grant some sort of feedback to your players, be it good or bad; naturally, actions that lead to a positive outcome will be more popular and will probably be repeated; actions that fail to succeed in the expected way are likely to become less common; that is essentially basic operant conditioning, and it works. Once one of your players had his character ran into a trap because they weren't looking, they will start looking for traps; once you have established that torturing prisoners will provide your players with additional useful information, the characters will lose inhibitions against torture. This is a part of the gamemaster responsibility package - as long as you act as some sort of interpreter of possible outcomes, you shape the expectations and potential actions of your players.
So. granting some sort of benefit for something you as a GM  considers to be contributing to the game, clever or just plain entertaining, that's not some of paradigm shift; it's just more of the same, perhaps a bit more in the open.  Is it meta-gamey? Sure. It is also a bit like giving someone a cookie for having great sex, because in the end contributing to something you are at least half-way enthusiastic about really should be its own reward, but that is not how it works most of the time. It might be surprising, but people like rewards and basking in the admiration of their peers.
So, in the end, who gets hurt by a mechanic like this?