What do you prefer?Roleplaying or powergaming?

[Luvian]

It's possible to have played hundreads of times, and still be a roleplayer.

What is really roleplaying? It's acting in character. It doesn't matter if your character start the game with 25 in everything, the killsword and Imoen's belt, or if he start out as a "regular" character. What's important is that the player create a background and personality for the character and then stick to it.

When a player use his personal knowledge to help his character, it's called metagame thinkig. In a CRPG game, it can be hard not to do it, as you replay the same game over and over again, and if you fail, then you need to do it again, too.

If for some reason, you got to a monster, and can't kill it no mather what, you are stuck with 2 choices. Delete your game and restart, probably running in the same problem, or just forget it for now. You don't really have any choice but to leave. You could pretend your characters decided to go resuply in town and got too busy to go back and finish exploring that dungeon. You could also start the fight with the monster, and then after a few seconds of getting your ass kicked, you could run away.

What if there is a death trap in front of you, and you absolutely need to cross it? You could have one of your character cross and triger the trap and then revive him, or maybe your thief just followed his instincs and decided to make a quick check for trap in that suspicious hallway/doorway/chest. Of course, a good roleplayer would play the part of an adventurer, and send his thief scouting ahead all the time to find traps and monsters. It would be stupid to blindly walk around in an old crypt.

The bottom line is that this is not a pen and paper game, in pen and paper, your DM would not put you in an impossible situation, but the game do, so sometimes you have no choices but to help your characters a little.

What's important is that you don't overdo it. It's ok to wait until you have at least one +4 weapon before going to fight Kangaxx, it's not to go buy a pack full of protection from magic and undead scrolls. It could of course be justifiable once on a while, maybe yout character just went shoping for scrolls the day before and among all the scrolls he bought he happened to buy those, but if you do it for every hard encounter, that that's ridiculous.

Just remember to act in character. If you decided that your Wizard Slayer really hated mages and kill them on sight, then don't recruit Edwin. What you should do is kill him on sight. It will ruin the quest, but that's what your character would do. If he is selfish and sexist, he probably would not say kind thing to his romance, ending it very fast.

And to finish, here's a quck way to know if you are a roleplayer. Are you willing to botch quests, miss powerfull items/npcs or say stupid things if that's what your character would do? If yes, then you are a roleplayer. It's not a big deal if you buff up before every fights if you at least act in character the rest of the time.

[Raistlin Majere]

I must say that i have started to roleplay this game just a little while ago(after i got bored of running through the game with every character un-realistically strong/unbalanced. example: a mage with stats like str:18, dex:18, con:18, int:18 and then wis and cha at 7 or so), but i do wish that i had started much earlier. ah well, i guess ill have to wait until i get to play p&p games, to really roleplay...

[Dron_Cah]

First of all, P&P GAMES ALL THE WAY!! Alright, now that that's out of the way, I think the hardest thing to roleplay is your chars statistics. Think about it; you make a character with a higher or lower Int than yourself. You find it hard to raise your thoughts to the "caliber" of the wizard, or on the flip side, are annoyed by something you would know easily, but shouldn't do because your char just cant keep up with that train of thought. So really what i mean when I say stats is Int, Wis, and Cha. How could a socially dereft person play a smooth talking bard? This is something that really strains your abilities to act out a character, and in many cases, also the most enjoyable. It really gives yopu the idea of improv and the such. (Oh, I noticed something contrary to my little rant. It would be easier to play a completely idiotic char, as you would literally walk around as a simpleton. Some people could find this chafing, but it sounds kind of fun to me!)

Later