IronAngel wrote:
Allowing the roll of a die to guide your character's actions is such a turn-on. It takes power from you and makes you adjust. It reminds you you're not the sole author of your Mary Sue story. And to be honest, I find it a little disingenuous to claim you know beforehand what your character will find convincing; you don't even know that about yourself. There's a good chance a charismatic person you admire will one day completely change your attitude about something. Ignoring that possibility in game to preserve your carefully-crafted, static portrayal of your character is unsportsmanlike and not very true to your character as a living, complicated person besides.
But the whole point is to have RP based on a mutual trust that each of the players is capable of flexing and playing their characters as erroneous individuals. Or hells, if you want your character to be a Mary Sue, even though that is totally absurd as I cannot see how anyone can enjoy that kind of RP, we should admit that liberty based on mutual trust that the person knows what s/he's doing. It's stupid to impose extraneous rules on players, and I still fail to see how it is a double standard that one thing on the character sheet describes your character and the other doesn't; that's a bit of an overstatement since this is a game and we should collectively decide what features of this game are important in order for us to have fun.
It's not unfair that we base our RP on one thing but exclude the other; since the norm is not to take social skills into account as a description of your character's personality, I don't see why we should enforce a different standard. I prefer relying on people that may play exactly the way they want. And I didn't mean that roleplaying your character as a type, as it were, would entail static portrayal let alone disallow a complicated personality. It's silly to think the two were related. If you can somehow convince me that rolling a die would enhance my roleplaying experience, I will totally agree with you on everything. But I'm a prejudiced boy and hard to please. Besides, I get too big of a thrill out of the building mechanics of Amia and NWN to let a portion of that change due to a possibly meaningless or unwanted modification.