The RPGA used to vote for "best roleplayer" at each table and the winner got a cert that gave a one-time +1 to a dice roll. I think the loss of the winners certs hurt RPGA roleplaying more anything else.
My opinion? Competing with others for "best rp" was a terrible idea that I hope never sees the light of day again. People voted for friends, if it was a group of strangers with a lone female (whoever she was or how well they roleplayed) would win. It turned a cooperative game into a competition. I "won" my fair share of the time and I still hated it.
The RPGA used to vote for "best roleplayer" at each table and the winner got a cert that gave a one-time +1 to a dice roll. I think the loss of the winners certs hurt RPGA roleplaying more anything else.
Table voting was really for "best player" (whether it was "best roleplayer" or not was arguable anyway). It ended in 2003, long before 4E, and was really an artifact of an era in the RPGA in which the organization's focus wasn't on "living-style" campaigns, but on different sorts of adventures (what are now referred to as "classic" style adventures) in which a player did not maintain the same character from adventure to adventure, and which were largely built around interesting roleplaying situations.
It was also an artifact of the days in which the RPGA was more of a competitive environment, and was not necessarily seen as a "big tent" which tried to encourage as many people to play D&D as possible. To be honest, RPGA in those days was a bit of an elite organization, focused on supporting experienced players.
And, I concur with amysrevenge and aljergensen -- table voting was a good theory, but in practice, pretty severly flawed. I don't really think "table winners" strongly correlated with good roleplaying.
"Of course [Richard] has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183, and we're barbarians!" - Eleanor of Aquitaine, "The Lion in Winter"
1) Regional Flavor and 2) MetaOrgs - I think these represent a larger concept, the idea being to get players invested in their characters and the game world. Roleplaying definately suffers if players aren't given personal reasons to care. I agree in that more still needs to be done.
Adventuring Companies have mostly turned out to be a joke, you barely see them used. I partly blame the "one character per player allowed" restriction as partly responsible. It prevents a player from having a number of level ranges he or she can play in the company, which coupled with the hyper-narrow adventure level ranges result in characters in the same company often not getting to play together as their levels grow apart. Perhaps it should be restricted to "one character per sub-tier", e.g. 1-4, 4-7, 7-10, etc.
3) Skill Challenges - While they were not designed to be 'substitutes' for roleplaying, they are often treated by players and DMs alike as such.
There does come a point where the INTENT of the design starts mattering less than how it actually turned out. You can say, "That's not what is intended." only so many times - if people continue to treat them that way, well, that is the new reality. Pretending it isn't a problem doesn't make the problem go away.
4) No penalty for death - I can see this impacting the player's investment in the game world, similar to 1) and 2), in that it can result in a cavalier 'gamist' attitude that really isn't how a character is likely to act. No matter how much a player might know that death is meaningless, few CHARACTERS should be so blasé about dying. At the very least, dying hurts, man!
5) Alignments mattered - Eh. I've often seen alignment as a straightjacket as much as it was a tool. Always seemed like an artificial constraint on personality to me. People just don't fit into 9 neat little personality boxes. Or 5, for that matter.
If a player keeps shifting his character's moral outlook, it usually means he's just not emotionally invested in his character enough to maintain an estalished personality. As above, this stems from not having reasons to care.
6) Free and Unlimited Retraining - I don't like this either. Would have preferred it to be once a year at most. I feel, like the lack of a real death penalty, it engenders another level of disconnect between players and their characters, encouraging the treatment of characters as mere collections of numbers.
7) Replaying - I don't like it. I can't enjoy playing an adventure I already know the ending to. SO far, though, folks seem to be making efforts not to spoil things for others.
8) Race and class over-proliferation - I do wish the LFR admins had more say in what gets allowed in the campaign. Some of the stuff that's been shoveled in really does not mesh well with the Realms. Again, you get that disconnect, where the Realms is now merely "generic fantasy world X".
9) Emphasis on playing a "role" and "table balance" over playing a "character" - There's always been role and table balance issues. Always. There were issues back in the 1990s with Living City, there are issues today. Just because roles are well defined does not mean it needs to impact how well characters are roleplayed.
-karma
LFR Characters: Lady Tiana Elinden Kobori Silverwane - Drow Control Wizard Kro'tak Warscream - Orc Bard Fulcrum of Gond - Warforged Laser Cleric
The RPGA used to vote for "best roleplayer" at each table and the winner got a cert that gave a one-time +1 to a dice roll. I think the loss of the winners certs hurt RPGA roleplaying more anything else.
Good riddance. In my experience, "best roleplayer" usually just equated to loudest, biggest glory hog, youngest, female, or (most frustratingly) stupidest antics.
You don't promote good roleplaying with rewards. You promote "aggressive" roleplaying. And those are definitely not the same things. If someone is going to roleplay well, it is because they have a personality that they enjoy such actions.
How we define roleplaying has evolved in my club. I make absolutely no claims as to how other groups or clubs are playing.
5 years ago, roleplaying was defined, more or less, as "interacting with NPCs in-character". Player <-> DM interactions ruled the day.
Today, roleplaying is defined, more or less, as "interacting with other PCs in-character". Player <-> player interactions rule the day.
Sure, there are always and have always been exceptions, but in general we no longer roleplay with the adventure while we happen to be accompanying each other, we roleplay with each other while we happen to be on the adventure.
Frankly, it's a shift that I like. It spreads the fun out more; concentrating less on the DM. And it evens out the variance in adventure quality too - even atrocious adventures end up being almost as much fun as the very best ones.
(1) Regional Flavor. Well, I've never really played in living campaigns before LFR, so I don't have comparison material. I do note that regional flavor is mostly absent in the LFR campaigns. Between adventures, your character "warps" all over the map for no reason. In most adventures it's not noticeable or relevant what region you are in; and if it is, they feel like some simple stereotype as "that area with forest elves", "that dwarf place with dungeon crawls", "that genasi region with floating rocks", or "that big city" (even Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate tend to be indistinguishable).
(2) MetaOrgs. This sounds like something that would be nice, at least in theory. I have no idea how it worked in practice, of course. I do note that "guilds" or whatever they were called were a big flop, at least in my general area.
(3) Skill challenges are a major design flaw in 4E and should be used as little as possible (and yes, I'm aware that WOTC mandates their inclusion in RPGA, unfortunately). They only work if the players are unaware of its mechanics, or intentionally ignore them, or if the DM plays them out as regular roleplaying while avoiding those mechanics like the very plague. They were a bad idea from day one, and they are still an awful idea after two years of "advice" on how to play them, and yes, ignoring a problem or saying "that wasn't our intent" doesn't make the problem go away. Wanna bet that the marketing campaign for 5E will spend a lot of time deriding SCs?
(4) No death penalty. As far as I've seen, most players and characters do treat death as significant, so the lack of a penalty doesn't seem problematic. That said, LFR is so extremely easy that character death is very, very rare: a handful per year over the entire 50+ player base in my area. And yes, people always play "up", not for the extra gold/xp, but for the hope that this might make it challenging (which it usually doesn't).
(5) Alignments are a huge can of worms. I've always houseruled them out of the game in earlier editions, and I'm glad they're (mechanically) gone now, because this avoids the perenial discussion that "you can't do that, you're neutral good!" and so forth. That said, most characters do tend towards Chaotic Greedy; in part this is because every single mission you will get gives you a huge cash award (and if your character doesn't care about gold, he will often not have much of an incentive IC to take the mission). This strikes me as a flaw in adventure writing: as they stand, almost all adventures reward greed, and almost none reward being good or heroic (or penalize being evil).
(6) Unlimited retraining. Yeah, I don't like that rule and I don't use it. I haven't seen anyone abuse it so far, though, so I don't consider it a big deal. It's only mechanics anyway: players shouldn't be penalized for having made poor build choices when they were inexperienced.
(7) Replaying. I don't see it as a big deal to replay an adventure with a different character; it'll usually turn out different anyway. It's not like there are many adventures out there that give you a meaningful choice that you would make differently if you had prior knowledge. I do have spotted some players playing adventure X because it has good loot, though.
(8) I agree that there are too many races and classes now, but of course this sells books for WOTC. That said, the overwhelming majority of players stick to PHB1 races and classes, and a few early-print iconics like Swordmages and Drow. Perhaps as a result of race proliferation, several races are practically indistinguishable. For instance, half-orcs and goliaths are both big hulking brutes, so it's not generally noticeable which of the two a character is.
(9) Table balance. It took a bit of convincing, but eventually people got around to the reality that you do not need Exaclty One Of Each Role in order to make a viable table. Every combination of roles is equally playable as long as it contains a healer. That said, characters that aren't strikers (and don't play as strikers, because many classes have a striker-like build) are somewhat rare.
(10) Regarding a decrease in roleplaying, I note that RP'ing pretty much stops whenever we're in a combat situation or in a skill challenge. This is because of the heavily mechanical nature of both; the rules get in the way of RP'ing. RP'ing between mechanical encounters is just fine, though. What I find hinders character development is the lack of group cohesion, and the almost total absence of verisimilitude in the rules.
(11) A player vote for best player? Yeah, that's a bad idea. I remember going to non-living convention adventures, and indeed my experience is that people vote for their friends, or for the cute girl at the table. In one case, we had an adventure where only the "best" players (by vote) could go to the next adventure; the result was that "good" players didn't want to vote for their competition, so many people ended up voting for the worst player on the table!
So in summary, I see a problem in (a) the lack of regional flavor, (b) skill challenges, (c) adventures rewarding greed but not rewarding heroism, and (d) the rules strongly getting into the way of RP'ing; and I don't see the big deal about metaorgs, lack of death penalties, unlimited retraining, replaying, racial proliferation, table balance, and lack of best-player votes.
(4) No death penalty. As far as I've seen, most players and characters do treat death as significant, so the lack of a penalty doesn't seem problematic. That said, LFR is so extremely easy that character death is very, very rare: a handful per year over the entire 50+ player base in my area. And yes, people always play "up", not for the extra gold/xp, but for the hope that this might make it challenging (which it usually doesn't).
I see death in LFR happening about as frequently as it does in home games... which is very rarely. And that's a feature.
(In fact, I see PC death in LFR games more than in home games, because of the more "it's a game" perspective you're talking about. If you made LFR harder, you'd make it clearer that it was just about combat, and you'd reduce RP more. It's ok for the PCs to win 99.9% of the time. That's how the game has been played for years now)
"Nice assumptions. Completely wrong assumptions, but by jove if being incorrect stopped people from making idiotic statements, we wouldn't have modern internet subculture." Kerrus
Practical gameplay runs by neither RAW or RAI, but rather "A Compromise Between The Gist Of The Rule As I Recall Getting The Impression Of It That One Time I Read It And What Jerry Says He Remembers, Whatever, We'll Look It Up Later If Any Of Us Still Give A Damn." Erachima
(10) Regarding a decrease in roleplaying, I note that RP'ing pretty much stops whenever we're in a combat situation or in a skill challenge. This is because of the heavily mechanical nature of both; the rules get in the way of RP'ing. RP'ing between mechanical encounters is just fine, though. What I find hinders character development is the lack of group cohesion, and the almost total absence of verisimilitude in the rules.
3) Skill Challenges - While they were not designed to be 'substitutes' for roleplaying, they are oftentreated by players and DMs alike as such.
There does come a point where the INTENT of the design starts mattering less than how it actually turned out. You can say, "That's not what is intended." only so many times - if people continue to treat them that way, well, that is the new reality. Pretending it isn't a problem doesn't make the problem go away.
-karma
Karma, well stated.
I appreciate the thoughts and comments from everyone so far, but wanted to highlight the above quotes as pushing what I was trying to say in ways I had yet to consider.
I played classic and Living adventures frequently under the old* voting system, probably more than anyone still posting here, and also frequently judged the events. I just didn't see the widespread abuse that people seem to remember. Granted, voting was done almost completely based on role-playing. There wasn't much credit given to, say, coming up with the winning strategy in the battle, or answering a riddle, even if these were all mentioned on the voting form. But I didn't see people voting for friends, or voting for women players, or strategic voting. I normally saw people voting for the best role-players. And the Grand Masters and Paragon tables were the most fun.
I know that I felt more invested in a game when there was a tangible reward on the line for active participation.
*Not the oldest system; I don't think I ever played when you could still vote for yourself.
