How's the Roleplaying?

[Thorguild]

My weekend game is pretty successful, by our group's measurement. We've had 5 consecutive games, no drop-outs, and few tantrums.

One thing I'm not seeing though, is role play. We roll a lot of dice, but we don't quip much. Heroes fight the baddies, but there's not much talking except as to how to put dice to action narration.

On the other hand, we have two young players with little role play experience. We use Maptools and Skype, so we miss out on face-time and putting the dice together is a lot less visual. Often our fights go long and we skimp on transition scenes.

I'm curious about other games. Are you finding it easy to have player-to-player role play? How about watcher characters? Do they do much besides get punched?

What kind of things do you do to promote the actual role in the role playing?

Thanks,

Thorguild

[Supplanter]

We have quite a lot of RP in both our face to face groups. PC-PC, PC-NPC. It's pretty much like any other roleplaying game for us.


Jim

[Nerd King]

We have quite a lot of RP in both our face to face groups. PC-PC, PC-NPC. It's pretty much like any other roleplaying game for us.


Jim

Ditto here.

I've run 5 sessions all told so far (a one-on-one trial, Breakout with published characters as a "training exercise" for our group and three sessions of home brew stuff) and our group have just taken to it as with anything I've run before.

In actual fact the freedom and creativity of teh game has probably helped our ii year old gamer to exert himself more. He's easily the most vocal gamer (having set up a private members club in the tower Tony Stark lent them as a team HQ, amongst other things...), and we have a real banter going as the PCs are developing.

[Prophetsteve]

Yeah, there isn't much difference between this game and other games our group has run, on the Roleplaying side.

Though running the Marvel characters has the advantage of us knowing enough to sometimes poke fun at them. I had way too much fun running Namor as a Watcher character.

[Dunlaing]

Often our fights go long and we skimp on transition scenes.

Resist this urge.

It's MUCH better to skimp on the action scenes than to skimp on the transition scenes. The transition scenes are where most of the roleplaying happens. Don't be afraid to use the 2d12 End The Scene option to kill an action scene that's dragging on too long,...even if the heroes are winning. I'd much rather have a fight end quickly so we have enough time for our transition scene before ending the session than play out a fight that is already past its tipping point and then have less roleplaying afterward.

IMO, of course.

[The Doom Pool]

I'd say the roleplaying is, as often is the case, group-dependent. That said don't forget the role of milestones in prompting roleplay. Milestones can be used to encourage tension, teamwork, emotion, etc. All of which can have intriguing effects both in and out of Action Scenes.

[Thorguild]

Replying to the 2D12 option

I'd love to end with a 2D12 narration! I've never been able to do it. Last weekend I had (IIRC) 1D12 1D10 5D8 and 1D6 in the Doom Pool. A player had 12 PP! I never got that second D12.

It was an arms race, with him using 5 PP to add total Dice, and me adding 4D8 on several rolls, and buying them back.

I only had one watcher character, and never wanted to give up my action to grandstand. I will have to remember to keep some more characters in the mix to do that.

Thorguild

[Shingen]

I'd say the roleplaying is, as often is the case, group-dependent.

This. Everyone needs to work to get some roleplaying. This game helps by creating narration through mechanics, but if you aren't quipping, there aren't any mechanics for that - you need to make the quips. Everyone has to buy in, and go for it.

I've been in D&D 3.5 groups with heavy roleplay and so-called storygames with none; the group usually sets the roleplaying. This game is great about aiding it, but you still have to make a serious go at it.

[pksullivan]

Role playing is an ephemeral thing. Game rules can help facilitate role playing (MIlestones in MHR, moves in Apocalypse World, etc.) but game rules are not role playing. In the end it does require player involvement and action for role playing to actually happen.

My Friday night group tends to follow my lead. If I, as the GM, get into character and interact with them as a character in the fiction, they respond in kind. This has led to some very satisfying role playing in games of all sorts (D&D 4E, Dresden Files, SotC, MHR, and more). I will say it has been easier for me to do this in situations where social interactions in the fiction are given mechanical weight and support. The Dresden Files game was really satisfying, despite a problematic player at the table. The first twenty sessions of my D&D 4E game was full of great RP before a combination of group drama and lack of rules support for RP drifted us to a tactical minis game. This is in part to my improvisational nature as a GM; D&D doesn't support that well, so I tended to drop the RP and focus on what 4E does do well: combat. Again, my group follows my lead. Without me pushing the RP angle, they were happy to be monsters on the battlefield. I got burnt out.

MHR has some tools to encourage and guide RP, such as milestones and distinctions, but it will require players to actual role play. Just like any game with my group, when I drop into character and engage the players in the fiction, they respond in kind. We get a lot of world building and character exploration out of that. Milestones have defined character interactions and relationships, and distinctions guide player actions (or at least give them color). My players seem to really enjoy the way the game handles so I look forward to a nice, long campaign in our version of the Marvel universe. One thing we realized this last session is that RP should be largely freeform. The rules don't really strongly support social encounters unless you build a mind-affecting super (which none of my players did) and if you did that, it introduces a ton of ethical questions about the use of mind control. If you want to make a resource during a transition scene, just spend the plot point to do it. A little bit of in-character discussion adds a lot of color to that one little mechanical bit.

[Battlechimp]

One thing we realized this last session is that RP should be largely freeform. The rules don't really strongly support social encounters unless you build a mind-affecting super (which none of my players did) and if you did that, it introduces a ton of ethical questions about the use of mind control.

Well, the Mental Stress section does approach mental stress from the angle that it can represent arguments - with being stressed out as changing your thoughts on a subject. Also suggests you can use complications to represent pushing an agenda or saddling someone with something that might color or hinder their interactions in social situations. So you don't necessarily NEED to be a mind controller to push folks buttons mechanically...

That said, I'm gonna digress back to the general topic...

Game mechanics often can not MAKE someone Role-Play in the conventional sense; aka talk a lot in character or first person, engage in long conversations, provide lots of flavorful descriptions of their actions, ect. It can push them to take actions in the game that align with what the players view as the established character, which I maintain IS role-playing, but even Milestones and Distinctions won't make players do the other stuff if they're not feeling it. The later is BEST you can hope for as a baseline with mechanics; I have yet to see a system that tries to enforce the former not fly apart when someone isn't in the groove.

I've learned to just take a macro view of events and not worry if any particular player said a whole lot of stuff in character or provided a lot of fluff to what they're doing. What they actually did and possibly why they were doing it and what it leads to next matters more to me. This is one reason I like MHR very much (also one reason I like 4e); since there's narrative weight attached to every part of an action, even if a player isn't providing fluff or context for their actions the very nature of using the mechanics creates some from scratch and if you're not feeling like it you don't HAVE to add more to still have something for others to work with if they want to.

I also totally reject the notion that once someone starts punching someone else, the RP stops. That's entirely a group thing. You don't NEED a transition scene to RP. Hell, more RP goes on in my action scenes then in my transition scenes. I'd detail all the character development that's happened in Action Scenes but that would entail recapping 80% of our game sessions so far...