Abstraction - Interesting Combat, Boring RP

[Oracle_Hunter]

I have never believed that a system can influence a group's roleplaying. A genre might, though.

There are a few to the contrary.

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oWoD (and even nWoD) attach mechanical benefits to roleplaying in certain ways. In oWoD it had to do with your Nature and Demeanor (i.e. vague archetypes) and in some games it was the only way to restore Willpower within a session. In nWoD there is the comparatively more sophisticated Virtue and Vice system. In both cases it is hard to trigger these mechanics without roleplaying and, indeed, the text of the rules discouraged STs from granting the benefits if the Players didn't work hard enough.

Bliss Stage does this more broadly by having fully half the mechanics (specifically, the reward & advancement portion) depending solely on free-form roleplaying scenes between characters. Briefly, a Player's main character ("Pilot") is placed in a scene with one of the other characters he has a Relationship with (Relationships are a term of art in this context) and that character is then acted out by either another Player or the GM. A third person (Player or ST -- whomever is free) then acts as Judge and calls the scene into action and declares when it is done. When the scene is over the Judge then decides what category of scene it was (based off of simple criteria in the rulebook) and grants the Pilot a mechanical benefit as a result.

In each of these cases, the mechanics attached to roleplaying influence how a Player works within a system. In the weakest case (WoD), Players who do not roleplay as the system demands either run out of Willpower (a valuable resource) or simply have less use of it. In the strongest case (Bliss Stage) if you do not bother to roleplay you will not be able to heal damage from the dice-rolling part of the game, let alone increase the strength of your main character to face additional obstacles.

In short, while mechanics cannot stop roleplaying (as Roleplaying is its Own Reward) they can influence and even increase roleplaying if they tie rewards to them. Of course, no amount of rules will turn a schlub into Shakespeare but that should go without saying

EDIT:

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that when mechanics overtake roleplaying in a *roleplaying* game, something is definitely wrong.

Well now, "overtake" is a difficult term to parse.

In the Strongest case, this means "dice rolls should never trump diceless actions" in which case why have rules at all? If you didn't say you searched the skull, why should the DM give you the benefit of the doubt? If your argument isn't persuasive to the Duke, why should any Diplomacy check matter? If you hold such to be true then the only mechanic you need for any game is a coin-flip to decide situations where the DM is undecided. The general argument against this is that people play roleplaying games to be people they are not -- if the 90 lb weakling can pretend to be Conan the Barbarian, why can't the wallflower pretend to be Casanova? Neither can be done without rules that permit the former to swing a sword that weighs more than himself and the latter to seduce ladies even if he can't string two words together on his own.

In the Weakest case this means "rules shouldn't stop me from making the story work" -- if the bad guy needs to escape, then movement rules shouldn't stop him from doing so. In the alternative, this means that when you give a persuasive argument to the Duke no amount of bad dice juju should stop it from working. The Weakest case is best addressed by good rule design and, unfortunately, good adventure design: good rules reflect the expectations of the Players and good adventures aren't derailed by bad dice rolls. Ultimately this is an unsatisfying response -- what makes for "good" rules? -- but it is still the proper response; all it really means is now we have to have a discussion about what makes "good" rules