Ale Break: Debunking the Role-playing vs. Roll-playing dichotomy

I would like to take a moment to debunk the often-touted Role-playing vs. Roll-playing argument.

Let me start by saying that there are many things about RPGs that are enjoyable. There's getting together with your friends and having social time, joking around, catching up. In most RPGs there's also a significant tactical or combat game aspect to them - RPGs without a heavy focus on combat in the rules are the rare exception. Then there's what many consider the holy grail of RPGs - the actual role-playing.

In my decades running and playing role-playing games, I have seen players that are good and bad at both. Sure, I've seen the powergamer who can't come up with a name for his character. I've seen the roleplayer who lives for a well-developed, consistently played character - rarely. I've even been in a few games where I made characters purely for their flavor, ignoring what would make them effective within the rules, and not been able to get into character properly - I've been bad at both role and roll at the same time.

I've seen players that complain about the lack of role-playing in games completely fail to do any role-playing when presented with attempts to engage them directly.

And I've seen the player that is not much of a role-player and who's characters are very effective within the rules turn into quite a role-player over time.

Some players are easy to engage, others not so easy.

It's a given that in any game there will be people who are better, or more interested than others, in making characters that are powerful. Even in game systems like Amber, where there are almost no game mechanics, someone who is good at it can dominate the other players in overcoming the challenges presented. But that's going to be the nature in any game: humans are very clever monkeys and will always be looking for better ways to succeed at what they do.

I think that setting expectations in games, both as a player and a DM, is much more important in determining how much role-playing is seen at the table than how good someone is at making characters that are very effective within the rules.

I had an interesting experience the other day. I wasn't feeling up to DMing on Sunday, so Dan graciously ran a pre-written adventure on the fly. I made a 4e version of one of my reoccurring characters, Kylissa Flamebraid - a female dwarven sorcerer, who's kind of a teenage runaway, rebelling against her father, with a magic powers she inherited from her maternal grandmother (usually skips a generation in dwarves). I have a small stock of characters I've worked out the backgrounds of because it takes me a while to come up with new ideas, and Kylissa is one of them.

Because it was a pre-written adventure that Dan was running on short notice, we were mostly sticking to the canned text and not doing a lot of role-playing. But a number of times during the adventure I found that if I stuck to talking in character, espically when talking to the other players about events in the adventure, they tended to respond in kind.

I'm going to try to find a way to gently encourage everyone in future games to stay in character. Roleplaying cam be a very contagious type of fun, and the more I have in my games the better I like it.

So, to those who are endlessly complaining about those who come only to "roll-play" my question is what are you doing, as a player or as a gamemaster, to draw those players into their roles, or to help them develop them?