Favor role-play over roll-play

I come across a lot of interesting posts and pieces of information as I wander across the Internet and came across a post Simple is Good by Troll Lord of The Dens.

It’s a short post that talks about the the fun he recently had with a weekend full of gaming, something I think all of us wish we could do more often. He mentions that there were no arguments, no rule discussions – just a lot of fun playing.

The nugget to take away from his post was it’s important to keep things simple if you want the game to move along and for everyone to have fun. In the case of an RPG that means using role-playing instead of roll-playing to get the job done.

I mentioned something similar to this some time back in my post, Don’t touch those dice! In that post I brought up the simple fact that just because you can roll dice to determine the outcome doesn’t mean you should. In Troll Lord’s case, he found that ruling in favor of the story and not the mechanic, made everything enjoyable – the same basic principle.

So the next time you’re sitting behind the GM screen and need to make a decision, think about those things and then put the dice and rule book down and just make the best call you can in favor of the story – your players will thank you for it.

May your dice roll well.

Check out Simple is Good by Troll Lord.