'Conventions, customs, consensus, or the lack thereof?'

[bilbous]

As far as I can see if you are going to acknowledge the stats at all in your role play you must raise at least some of them to 200 just to be an average character, leaving them as generated means you are crippled. The normal people, the ones that are assumed to inhabit the places where characters -- pc and npc -- wander through, are the ones that do not grow and have no impact on the realm. If you wish to play these people then you take your default stat/skill and never train. They are the ones who never make it out of the death realm. They do not have enough life force to survive Dakkru taking her cut.

Bilbous has max stats but no skills above ~110 I do not think him overpowered and I wouldn't hesitate to claim any ability he has. My other characters are below 'average' and cannot compete with him nor would they try. I would not use them in an adventure hunting ulbernauts because they do not generally have a death wish. If this was a DnD game back in the day my third level characters would call on the 8th level characters to confront the red dragon. It is all about making level appropriate adventures for your characters. You can go clean out all the goblin nests you want with a high level character but it won't be very rewarding.

Exploiting coding deficiencies cannot be considered proper play, but even then you could justify considerable climbing with the undeveloped climbing skills and tools. People do get up to the top of Everest and other such places.

[Rigwyn]

It is all about making level appropriate adventures for your characters.

And when you ignore stats and just go by relative strengths and weaknesses, you are effectively doing this. If I treat character X as a powerful RW mage, Y as an expert swordsman, and Z as a tragically clumsy healer in training, then each player can play their role without worrying about numbers and equations.

The problem with this system is that its trust based. I trust you to choose reasonable relative strengths and weaknesses. I trust you to take reasonable damage where appropriate. If you can't play this way, then either I resort to some dice based agreement to eliminate the trust/judgment element, or I don't play with you.

[novacadian]

The problem with this system is that its trust based. I trust you to choose reasonable relative strengths and weaknesses. I trust you to take reasonable damage where appropriate. If you can't play this way, then either I resort to some dice based agreement to eliminate the trust/judgment element, or I don't play with you.

Maybe we are approaching the crux of the matter. It has been certainly made evident that RPers as a general rule want nothing to do with dice. Thus it seems obvious that we end up at that final point most of the time. ie. "I don't want to play with you."

If this is the crux then much is explained. The ever more smaller group of rpers don't want to play with the ever more growing amount of folks that arrive looking for Role Playing and not understanding that RP is not nessasarily that and are excluded and leave.

[Rigwyn]

What I am talking about is generally those who cannot or will not adapt. Everyone, us included, needs to be able to adapt to some degree. We need to bend a little here and there where appropriate.

As for people getting turned away, I think I've only avoided a few people in the few years I've been here. In these cases, the players were either terribly immature ( as in not yet capable of communicating like adults - possibly due to young age ), godmodders and griefers.

When a person is unable or unwilling to play cooperatively, there really isn't much else you can do. I'm not going to RP with someone who has the mentality and maturity of a seven year old, I'm sorry. Someone else can do that. That's not enjoyable for me.

As for dice, I would certainly experiment with someone who was good at it, someone like yourself. It's quite possible that my experiences with dicing have been poor ones. Based on past experience, I don't really like dicing.

[bloodedIrishman]

I have used dice in the past. On one roleplay server, dice are used almost entirely to decide combat outcomes. Each person takes turns and rolls based on equal thresholds of success or failure. No skills, abilities or conditional advantages are taken into account. This method is horrible for obvious reasons.

I can see how some dice systems are adaptable and account for skills, abilities and conditions. I am willing to experiment with these methods of roleplay.

[novacadian]

My misunderstanding then Rigwyn and bloodedIrishman.

[Kaerli_Stronwylle]

To continue this thread...I'm getting the impression more and more that some desire to impose a system *atop* PS's own mechanics, or instead of them.  What is that system, though? 

[bilbous]

The System: "I am always right and you are always wrong!"

[Taya]

My issue with dice is that either they seem to not account for skills in any way at all (overly simplified and ends with massively OOC outcomes quite frequently) or you get a system that accounts for skills and so on, but then it feels (to me at least) like it's interfering with the actual RP/storytelling to too great a degree.

I don't want to spend my RP time pausing to mess around with dice, though I've never been against tossing a coin or throwing dice early on to decide who the eventual winner in combat will be if two characters are equally matched, and then having the goal of writing something together to reach that outcome.

[tman]

The problem with RP fighting is that it gets ugly when both players want "to win."  If a player gets into a fight with the goal "I want my character to kill your character" then it's not going to be enjoyable.  That's when you need some system to determine who "wins," whether it's a flipping a coin, rolling dice based on skills, or whatever.

[Volki]

IC and OOC separation should erase that problem, tman. People like that are not roleplaying. They're just pretending to be superior versions of themselves. When they lose the dice-rolls, they'll whine or rage until you bend to their will.

That is why I dislike rolling dice. It breeds competition and unfriendliness. Players then lose ingenuity and leave everything up to chance. The smarter player or character loses to the brave idiot. Everything is left up to the die and there is no process or reasoning for why things happen. Fights degenerate to "/me attacks your leg", "/roll 6", "/me slices off a chunk of your leg". Boring. Most of us who roleplay have the maturity to remove ourselves from our characters and sensibly decide who wins, without any argument whatsoever. Even the competitive ones know when they've lost.

The only times dice should be used is when a player does not want to be the one to decide the result of an action or a random circumstance.

[bloodedIrishman]

Exactly.