Thanks for your comments as well, Miikun - you raise a valid point!

A lot of how I used to run PnP sessions was dependent on the talents of the participants to take into account the skills of their characters when they roleplay. That is, I didn't allow them to roleplay "above their skills" - but if what they did sounded plausible given their skills and the importance/difficulty of the situation, I always tried to forgo the dice rolling (although I tended to roll them anyway to confuse the players - I just didn't read the results).

Thanks for the comments Wolfie, though I suppose it really depends on our pnp background how we choose to use the rule system. In the case of a roleplay solution to the bribe in one of our games, the character statistics are there to determine if the character is even capable of pulling off the verbal feint, so he makes a charisma save to determine if the the Inkeeper accepts the bribe, or the words coming out of the player's mouth were embellished by a spray of the remains of last night's dinner. Though after a successful dex save, our speaker manages to direct the bulk of his discharge in the direction of Mull, the much-abused cleaning boy, getting a hearty laugh from everyone in the room. I have always felt that the rules are there to statistically model how things work in the world, and that character stats place a limitation between what a player wants to do, and what the character is capable of doing. Otherwise if we were playing it straight by Role, we wouldn't need character stats since the character's Archetype would determine what the limits of their abilities would be. Considering the difficulty of implementing true role-play interpretive parsers into these games, the next best thing is to properly and diligently implement the rules of the world. We all secretly wish that a computer can properly play the role of a human DM, but we know that can never happen. So in the meantime, we have games which play by the rules as much as possible, with a thin veiling of story and we end up with pretty fun little squad based wargames which have been so successful. I'm not sure what the other direction would be... The Medieval Sims perhaps? There you would have a definite role, interactions with other characters, quests, and stats. Somehow, it doesn't sound that appealing, at least to my sensibilities. Keep up the good work :)

Sorry about the typo there. The second player naturally rolled a 26 as it says in the "math" part.

Good comments, Miikun - However, I must beg to differ again.

I cannot say for sure about D&D (I only played the game a couple of times when I was about 12 or so), but most other RPGs that I've played have always clearly stated that you should give roleplaying precedence over dice rolling unless it was absolutely necessary. Dice rolling is best for situations where roleplaying through it may be difficult to rule fairly and consistently (such as fighting, jumping over a ravine, playing an instrument), while roleplaying is the best for other sort of situations. Let me give an example of a situation where the 2 players want to get information from a certain NPC. Both have a persuasion skill of 40 out of a hundred and the GM gives the dice roll a penalty of -20 because of the unfriendliness of the NPC:

1. One player chooses to roleplay the situation: "I approach the innkeeper, flaunting a silver coin, and tell him that 'It would be in your best interest to provide us with this information. We saw a group of King's Musketeers on the way here and when they arrive, it would be a shame for them to find out what you have done'"

The GM chooses that the player roleplayed the situation well and the innkeeper tells what he knows - or at least what the players need to know.

2. Another player chooses to roll dice instead. He's got a skill of 40 and he tells the GM that he'll also try to bribe the innkeeper with a silver coin. Then he rolls his dice (D100) and gets 46.

The GM adds together the skill, 40, the penalty, -20, a bonus of +40 for the bribe as well as the dice roll 26 and gets 86. The player would have needed 100 to succeed and thus the innkeeper gets the coin and lies to the players as much as he can get away with.

THUS, although the PnP RPGs provide you with a lot of rules, they usually beg you to roleplay whenever you can. It is only in situations in which fair and consistent judging may be difficult where the "roll-play" is required (mainly physical feats etc.).

While RPGs can emphasize the "Role", the "Roll" must have greater importance. Take for example, D&D, published by TSR (Tactical Strategic Rules) was essentially a wargame at heart, often played on grid maps with miniatures, sometimes battles are fought with no story at all. Other times, yes you play a story heavy/action light game, and in later PnP RPGs, some even discarded all tactical rulesets and concentrated on story and background information.. But that's not what we usually think of when we think RPG. We think of D&D with multiple manuals with enough tactical rulesets to fill a 10 week semester course. If it wasn't that important, they wouldn't have made the funny dice, and the player's handbook would only give you tips on how to role-play, and how to properly pray to your diety when casting your last level 5 spell of the day (and what makes that the last level 5 spell he's likely to grant your cleric.) That is the side of D&D which is more apparent in the "Hack&Slash" genre. Of course the story makes it all the more appealing, and the best CRPGs really take that to heart, but you can't point to a "Hack&Slash" which can be seen as a tactical real-time wargame, and say it's not an RPG. That would be like saying Icewind Dale (essentially almost all combat, and not much story) is D&D and isn't an RPG, that would be silly. On the other hand, if you take all the tactical combat out of Baldur's Gate, you end up with an Adventure game. When defining a CRPG, Roll>Role, but it's best served together.

I've never found a RPG that handled alignment the "correct" way. After all, you're dealing with an environment where the gods are so involved with the details of the world at large that they are essentially channeling their power through their worshipers. That makes those worshipers the gods' employees. Hey, if I'm going to provide resources to my employees, then, by gosh, they had better be doing what _I_ want then to do! It's not uncommon for gods to talk to their clerics in many CRPGs. That means, **they (the gods) are following current events**.

What's the most likely result of an employer learning that an employee is using company resources NOT for achieving the company's goals? At the very least it would be a reprimand. But most often, it's "Your fired!"

If that's the overview of the CRPG, it would certainly motivate a player to stay in character. Sort of ruins your whole day having your own god zapping you with lightening bolts when you deviate from The One True Path.

Found this blog through RPGDot and thought I might add my 2cents. I've been playing CRPG's for several years but never played a pen and paper game so that may colour my opinions a little. Starting in the days of Baldur's Gate et al i have bought and played a large cross section of the games that have come out in the meantime.

From that range I have to say that Oblivion was my most anticipated game and the one that was the biggest let-down. I have tried 3 times now to get into the game with a new character each time. Have lasted for less than 10hours each time. While Morrowind sucked up over 6months of my life with some 10hour sessions to boot. For me the big difference was the emotional investment in the story. I don't care about being a "hero" who saves the world, the slow trickle of information in Morrowind was much more seductive. You could still get glimpses of the main quest without even touching it. The leveled creatures in Oblivion also drove me crazy. I actually don't mind having to run away from a rampaging monster to then go back a few levels later and slaughter it.

I shall finish my essay now by making a quick mention of alignment, personally I prefer storylines that allow for moral ambiguity. For me it makes for a more fully realised character if you can reason out their decisions. Would my Ranger really side with the humans or the rampaging forest creatures. Or would she, instead of slaughtering all, try and find a peaceful solution to the conflict. That level of choice also helps with emotional investment in the character and the story.

Anyway I seem to have rambled on enough. Thanks for reading.

Good points there, GM23, but I beg to disagree with you on the linearity of pen-and-paper RPGs. Any good gamemaster will NOT force the players to get involved with a plotline that the characters are not interested in. It is always a question of motivation. If the GM is a good one, he will of course design the backgrounds of the characters _with the players_ so that they WILL BE motivated to solve the main quest. However, there WILL be side quests and missions that cannot be as well motivated as the main quest line.

Thus, a good GM will discuss the interests of the players and find plots and missions that truly interest them as players. He does not merely add hooks to the player's backgrounds to FORCE them to be interested, but actually wants to know what the players are interested in.

But, this all goes beyond the scope of CRPGs... ;)

And, yes, I also mentioned Oblivion because it is the current hot thing on the market. And, yes, I found it a LOT more interesting as an RPG than the competition because it did not force me to play the main plotline. Instead, I could become an assassin, or a valiant ranger if I wanted to. The valiant ranger naturally wanted to save the world he lived in, but the assassin never really cared to bother with it - but there still remained stuff for him to do and explore as well.

The main fault of Oblivion was naturally the imbalance between the world and the character's level - the developers simply cheated to make sure that the opposition would always provide a challenge to the player, but not be too hard to deal with. This, and many of the points I've given in my two blog entries, still show that there's a lot to improve in CRPGs.

Good points all around. I would like to point out, however, that though I mentioned [i]Oblivion[/i] several times, it was mainly because it seems to be the current hot CRPG -- NOT because I consider it to be a great RPG.

While running a game-oriented hobby store for several years with RPG campaigns running in the store basement 7 nights a week, and all day long on Saturdays and Sundays, I noted some common traits of the really, really good games. First and foremost was that the campaign had to have a very strong underlying story that fleshed out the longer the players stuck with the game. It was like reading a really good book for the first time: You started out knowing something about the plot, but you felt compelled to keep turning pages to see how the story developed. Seeing the story from the inside, as a participant, made the story that much juicier. Secondly, if the players took their roles seriously and acted accordingly, it was a LOT more fun for everyone. Like, how realistic would it be for a Paladin to backstab a Good Cleric, just because the Paladin player was pissed at the Cleric player? Or to have several self-proclaimed Good characters to associate with a self-proclaimed Chaotic Evil Assassin? The really good DMs would incorporate a system of checks-and-balances, complete with penalties for when players got sloppy and acted out of character. The punished player would be pissed -- after all, it's natural for most people to want to do whatever they damn well want to whenever they want. But it was interesting to see how the group dynamics motivated everyone to behave and play "properly".

It's really, really hard for an AI to handle that latter aspect. [i]Baldur's Gate[/i] touches on that by _slowly_ shifting alignment. But an AI's checks-and-balances are static: they can only cope with what the designers programmed it. Whereas, a live DM can easily see when a player is trying to bend the rules to get what he wants -- and then get creative and find a way to nudge the player to behave. Or maybe just snap, "Cut it out -- or I'll zap you for 50 hit points!"

Your last point here about Role-Playing games being about player choise and must be non-linear with their storyline is complete rubbish. First off, in a Pen-and-paper RPG, characters who get too far from the plots that the GM has created will quickly be steered back on course by a Game Master with any ammount of cleverness. Or if that GM is finally fed up with players who wish to do only their own thing, he will simply stop Game Mastering. A PnP game is supposed to be enjoyable for the GM as well.

But most importantly, a Role-playing game is about IMMERSION, not choise, and not acting. If the game does not have a device to pull you into the storyline, then it fails as a Role-playing game. Oblivion while a good game, is a horrible RPG. There is no drive to solve the main quest because it simply sits and waits for you. None of the quests in the game involve you in any way, it always felt more like the quests used you then needed you. And since you only improve your character through slaughter and coin(with the occasional book), there is little point to do much else than kill everything that is out of the towns. The Guilds and factions pointless because there is no conficts between them. I had no problems completing every quest in the main game (without the expansions) because they are just there to provide something to do, not actually involve you in the world.

Role Playing games are best when they have a solid motivator. My favorite has always been Fallouts timer. You could do just about anything you wanted to, but if you didn't hurry (somewhat) then it would be all over for your vault. This was a wonderfull way of pulling the player into the story because you had to interact with the envirionment and characters to find the clues you need to complete your mission. Then, once you've complete that part, there was the second half of the game which you could take your time. Now you felt like you mattered though.

Mainly, the issues is that if you give the player too much choise, the character becomes moot. In a Role-Playing Game, the player should want to be the character, not simply manipulating him. All of the truly great RPGs have done this, making you care a about a character that is not just an abstract blob of skills. "Planescape:Torment", "Fallout", "Baldur's Gate", "KOTOR", and even the old 'Gold Box' games of SSI; they found ways of drawing both on both character and universal ways to bring the player into the story, and did so by using a combination of linear, non-linear, envirionmental, and character techniques to make the player care what happens next.