What's on your mind?

[Darkpig]

4 hours ago, Count Chocula said:

There's no homebrew in my GMing. I might ask a player something like "If you want to turn that miss into a hit, I'm going to roll a d6 secretly and then, if the number is 5, the 5th roll you make for anything will be a spectacular failure. How important is it for you to make this hit?" So the player has all the agency.

 

Combat is mostly mechanics because it's almost entirely based on dice rolls and, in some games, tactical movement on a grid. People can and do role play during combat, though. But it's the player who controls the combat, not the character.

 

Inter-character social interaction in a good game is controlled by the players, as opposed to the dice, because it's all about what they say and do in character. And just like there can be some role play during combat, there are sometimes dice rolls in a social scene. In a bad TTRPG game, inter-character social interaction is just as mechanical as combat. If you've played enough TTRPG games, you've seen a situation where a player walks their character into a tavern and at some point says "I want to make a persuade check." I hate that. Unfortunately, that's the norm.

 

My saying for the behavior of most TTRPG players is that they play their character sheet, not their character. Some people are never in character. And that's why I haven't played a TTRPG in a couple of years. And likely never will again. Very few people want to play the way I want to play and the group I was in where we all (well, most of us) played that way petered out. I don't lament that because I'd rather play Skyrim than play in a sub-par TTRPG group.

It sounds like you moved on from TTRPGs some time ago so this conversation is awkward now.