Putting the 'RP' back in RPG

Assravaged 4rry detected.

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King Arthur Pendragon.
Your personality traits are important stats that grant big bonuses. If you play against your character or fail to adhere to them, they'll change and give you penalties in certain traits or bonuses in others.

>That has very little to do with the system and everything to do with your group.
This.

Although in my opinion, role-playing itself shouldn't be governed by rules or incentives at all. It only slows things down and makes people focus on the mechanic.

There was some old game that actively punished breaking character, Houses of the Blooded I think?

I'd make the argument that often systems discourage players from making the choice their character would due to it being sub-optimal, which gets in the way of roleplaying your character, so systems reward roleplaying to balance things out, so that players who do want to roleplay don't feel like their punishing themselves, and powergamers don't feel like they can't roleplay.

Stop playing Pathfinder for one.

It depends on what your players value. If they have some idea that they're supposed to "win" a roleplaying game, then yeah I guess you have to make RP part of the metagame.

>Is there an RPG that actively supports players staying in character?
Not really. That's really down to the group. A good GM can often keep people better focused on the game and prevent things from devolving into out-of-character banter, though a lot obviously depends on the players and their attitude.

You might want to try to avoid heavier, more combat-heavy systems, as the focus on tactics and crunching numbers and so forth may crowd out role-playing. Also, lots of groups do essentially no role-playing in combat (which, to me, is crazy as there are great opportunities there). Going with something rules-light should lead to less of a focus on the rules, which leaves more space for other things. Granted, this won't stop people from gabbing and joking around out-of-character, but it can increase the percentage of role-playing in the time that people are actually focused on the game.

Or you could go the other direction and get something like Exalted, which makes RP mechanically meaningful with stunts and shit.

I wouldn't have called stunts a roleplay mechanic, more just a fluff mechanic, they don't represent a meaningful choice on the part of the character, just creative description on the part of the player

You can still stunt in social combat, though, which is where your RP comes in.

what makes the social combat stunts a meaningful character choice?

>a meaningful character choice?
How you award dice for them? There's nothing intrinsically meaningful to them, they're just a reward for putting some work into your descriptions of your actions, which RP is a part of.

Winning has nothing to do with it. If a character is below the expected level of optimization the game has, then they're going to be a burden to the party. Not only will they be a burden, the player themself will feel like their character doesn't have a meaningful place in the game/party, because they don't contribute mechanically to it.

That entirely depends on how the system works.

No shit, sherlock. Read the post the post I replied to is replying to:
>discourage players from making the choice their character would due to it being sub-optimal
We're clearly talking about systms where that's how it works.

>hey're just a reward for putting some work into your descriptions of your actions, which RP is a part of
RP means playing your character, character is revealed through choices a character makes in terms of what conflicts to engage in and how to resolve them.

I think you have an overly narrow view of what RP is.

>I think you have an overly narrow view of what RP is.
Possibly. I just feel like in terms of conveying personality decisions made work much better than description so I'd rather see a system encouraging making choices in-character rather than only encouraging fluff.

I'd recommend GURPS.

You still got all your charms and skills and shit, so you still get choices of approach. You can just get extra dice for going beyond 'I use Charm X' and actually describing what your character does while using said charm. More dice for better descriptions (where better is not necessarily longer), and since that's subjective, you could only give out higher-bonus stunt awards to people who engage their character's personality by, I don't know, actually giving a small speech or something.

You've also got Intimacies, which social combat uses fairly heavily, and come in three grades (minor, major, defining). Intimacies represent goals, desires, likes, dislikes, that sort of thing. Emotional ties in general.

So you can express your character mechanically through Intimacies and their approach to social combat and shit, and then express them in ways the other characters will be able to more easily see by stunting with roleplay, and get mechanically rewarded for that.

It's less the system, and more your group.

I'm in two 5e games. One is definitely story oriented (had 3-4 combats total in about 2 months), with lots of scheming and side sessions between players. the other is almost a straight dungeon delve with some minor window dressing.

The difference between those two games is the amount of time spent on RP. My first game's DM steps aside mostly and allows us to scheme with and against each other, bringing in plot-relevant NPCs as appropriate.

The other DM gets antsy if we stand still for too long and forces the group to move on towards her combat encounters.

Players can be the same way too, naturally, but your group has to want the RP.

Came here to post this. TBZ is dope.

>for one

Should've been "Stop playing D&D for two." with quoting the 4e post. 6/10, D- Apply yourself, see me after class.

L5R with a DM that takes into account what you say on the table even if you meant it OOC. You make silly jokes, ends up having to duel someone for honor.

It's the opposite for my group.
These fucks RP so hard they hammer out 10 sessions of character development in 2 sessions.
And in the process usually psychologically eviscerate a DMPC