There’s a cliché in certain corners of the ttrpg hobby that “roleplay” is better than or preferable to “roll-play.” Let me explain.

Basically, the idea goes, in most traditional RPGs an over-emphasis on game mechanics, rigid structures, and character-sheet attributes leads to suboptimal or undesirable forms of play where players or the GM are rolling dice for things that should be automatic, intuitive, or resolved through some combination of play-acting, socializing, group consensus, or GM fiat.

This idea is prevalent in OSR circles, where it is bound up with the “Rulings, not Rules” idea. To quote the OSR sacred text, “A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming” by Matt Finch:

“The players can describe any action, without needing to look at a character sheet to see if they ‘can’ do it…This is why characters have so few numbers on the character sheet, and why they have so few specified abilities.”

So, instead of rolling to find a trap in a dungeon, you narratively describe how your character is searching, and the GM makes a ruling on whether they think it makes sense for you to find it.

(Hat-tip to The Alexandrian for debunking the assumptions behind this line of thinking all the way back in 2009.)

You also see this idea outside the OSR space, especially in rules-lite games and most games that lean more heavily towards storytelling games than true role-playing games. I’ve even seen it quite a bit among partisans of the entire Powered by the Apocalypse lineage of games, which is interesting because those games do tend to use dice rolls to resolve most actions.

This whole thing is basically a reaction against a trend that you saw crop up towards the end of AD&D’s lifespan and become dominant during the 3/3.5 era, that of crunchy character mechanics and lots of skill checks. There’s a lot I like about the 3.X/Pathfinder skill system bolted onto D&D’s class-based gameplay, but I see the argument that having a skill on the character sheet named “Climb” implies to some players that if they don’t have any ranks in Climb, they can’t climb.

GM: You pass some tall apple trees on the side of the road.

Player: I want to climb one of the trees and grab an apple so I don’t have to dig into my rations yet.

GM: Sorry, you have no ranks in Climb. You can’t do that.

(Or, alternatively)

GM: Give me a DC 10 Climb check. With your bonus of 0 in Climb, you have essentially a 45% chance of failing to get an apple.

Obviously this is not how it’s supposed to work in basically any game, and I’ve personally never encountered it at the table, but I believe the OSR and rules-lite and storytelling game players when they say this is a real thing that sometimes happens. (I also suspect it was probably more common in the 2000s and early 2010s.)

I don’t even want to point out that basically every RPG rulebook in history will explicitly tell players not to do stuff like this–you don’t roll dice to walk across a room.

Searching hidden areas is another area where this gets brought up. Never mind that OD&D still had die rolls for things like finding traps and listening at doors, OSR players will readily point out that “If the player says they search a desk, just tell them what they find, they don’t need to roll a Search or Investigate check for that.”

Well, sure, finding things that aren’t hidden doesn’t require skill and shouldn’t require a check. But what about a desk with a hidden compartment?

Under the “roleplay, not roll-play” philosophy, it’s simple–the players need to specifically tell the GM that they’re looking for a secret compartment. If they’re savvy enough to know to look for that, they deserve to be rewarded by finding what they’re looking for without the capricious dice gods deciding they didn’t.

Obviously treating “I look for secret compartments” as magic words that automatically grant you secrets isn’t fun, so most of these GMs, to their credit, expect the players to say something like, “I knock on the wood to see if there’s a hollow behind it,” or “How far back does the drawer go? Does it look like there should be more space behind it?” or such narrative actions.

This is better, but there are two problems. 1.) This also will get really annoying after a while. Is it desirable gameplay for players to have to go through a laundry list of common searching actions for every desk, chest, and dresser they think might be important? 2.) It eliminates a range of character differentiation based on perception and investigative skills and puts those traits squarely in the player’s hands (not the character’s).

I think a lot of players truly don’t care about problem 2 above. They are far more into the storytelling aspects of the game, or showing off how clever they as players are, and if the numbers on the character sheet get in the way of that they’ll happily ignore them.

I’m not one of those players, though.

What even is role-play?

If a game is a series of interesting choices (Sid Meier) then a role-playing game is a game where you make interesting choices as your character or role. The ability to create my own character and make choices as them is paramount for me, but it’s technically not necessary as long as you are making choices based on the character (role) you’re playing.

The first and more obvious way that the “roleplay not roll-play” people miss this is when they conflate “roleplay” with, like, “play-acting,” or “speaking in voices,” or “improv.” This is ironically something you see a lot of in the “How dare you ask me to play anything besides 5e?” world, but it’s by no means unique to it.

In other contexts, this is fine; we generally use “roleplay” to mean an activity where two or more people talk to each other “in-character.” I get why people bring this understanding into ttrpgs. It’s still wrong, because that form of roleplay is not a game. It can be fun and therapeutic and entertaining, but it’s not a game.

So the mere fact that you’re saying words as your character, or describing your character’s mannerisms or affectation as she searches the dresser for hidden compartments, does not mean you’re roleplaying. Your character could be witty and charming but if you’re making a choice in-game that isn’t what they would do, you’re not roleplaying no matter how many jokes you tell or funny voices you put on.

Why is your character searching this dresser for a hidden compartment? Do they have an actual reason to think there might be one? Or do you as the player just know that your GM expects you to?

Let’s move away from Search/Perception for a moment to talk about social interaction, where this debate really reaches its apex. The “roleplay” people really tend not to like social skill rolls like Persuasion or Intimidate–they want to “roleplay” (eyeroll) those interactions and have that be the deciding factor in whether they can seduce the bard or scare the bandits or convince the king to help them.

Sorry. Nope.

Now, if a player wants to give a dramatic speech representing their character’s words, that’s fine. Encouraged, even. But it isn’t roleplay and it isn’t superior to rolling an Oration or Public Speaking or Diplomacy or Charisma check.

Good roleplayers will tailor their words to their character. If their character is a violent barbarian, then even if they have a high Charisma or whatever, they’ll give their speech in an intimidating, fierce way, and hopefully have some kind of Intimidate skill to go with it.

Bad roleplayers will be playing a socially-awkward wizard or a dimwitted fighter and then still try to give a rousing Aragorn-style battle speech at the table because they like doing so.

That’s not roleplaying, and I as your GM am going to punish you by making you roll a Charisma check and then describing how uncomfortable it makes everyone when you fail it because your character just didn’t have the rizz to pull it off. I’ll let you describe how your character fumbled the speech to make it fall flat, but that’s what the dice are telling us happened.

This isn’t me just saying “don’t play-act unless your character has a high Charisma.” Lots of people in the real world have negative rizz and still try to give speeches, tell jokes, flirt, carouse, etc. But if that’s the kind of character you’re playing, play them that way.

And if that’s not the kind of character you want to play, don’t build them that way. Don’t dump Charisma if you want to play a charismatic character. You’d think this would be obvious, but it truly is not to a lot of people. They realize they can dump Charisma to boost their Strength, gaining a mechanical benefit, and the low Charisma doesn’t matter because hey, they can just “roleplay” it, right?

No, no, no.

The False Dichotomy

The second and more important way the “roleplay, not roll-play” people get lost in the sauce is a sort of inversion of the first. It’s the idea that if you’re rolling dice, you’re not role-playing.

I think this can be an honest mistake–you could be really, truly trying to inhabit your character and make decisions as them, and dice rolls take agency away. I think this is why social interactions bear the brunt of this fallacy; nobody is confused when the dice say the monster hit you with its talons, but social interactions are much more ephemeral, and to the play-actors, concrete in a way that a combat system can never be. You can actually say what your character says in the game world; you can’t actually swing an axe at a goblin.

If that’s genuinely just the style of play you prefer, I can’t stop you. However, I want to suggest that most of the people who think this is the correct way to play haven’t thought deeply enough about the alternatives.

Let’s take physical actions–you want to leap across a chasm. The extreme forms of OSR “rulings, not rules” players would say that all characters, as dungeoneering adventurers, should just be able to succeed at this without a roll, or alternatively that the GM should use their knowledge of how far the chasm is to decide by fiat if the players should be able to do it.

GM fiat is acceptable sometimes, but if you genuinely think it’s a substitute for real mechanics, then just play a storytelling game. GMs are players too, and as a GM I enjoy having mechanics both as guides and as gameplay that allow me to “discover” the story along with the players.

And having players automatically succeed at things like this strips the opportunity for meaningful choice from the players. They don’t have to think carefully about what kind of character they’re playing, if they have the athletic training to pull this off. They’ll never have interesting interactions like a party member hanging from the edge of the chasm and the party having to act quickly to pull them back up.

Now, most GMs wouldn’t let that kind of situation be auto-success; any good ruleset will tell you to roll dice when there’s a real risk of failure or danger. But the exact same logic applies to all sorts of other interactions, too.

If PCs are always going to detect traps as long as they pay the “I search for traps” tax, then why even have traps? Just to drag the game down and make players literally crawl and feel their way down every dungeon corridor with their fingers? That kind of interaction can be fun, but not for hours and hours of gameplay. At a certain point, you want to fight the monsters and get the treasure and go back to the tavern.

If you want to train your players to use a ten-foot pole to search for tripwires and pressure plates, then you’ll get a little bit of interesting gameplay as they learn this. However, they’ll very quickly learn they should just always have the ten-foot-pole out at all times, and now you’ve eliminated an entire game mechanic or class of encounters.

Why roll to find traps? Because sometimes it’s interesting if the players miss something despite their best efforts and have to eat shit (assuming your traps are interesting and not just HP taxes). Sometimes it’s fun for the non-thief character to catch something that the thief missed.

Why roll to Search or Investigate? Because sometimes missing a clue, then having to retrace your steps or find an alternative clue, is fun gameplay and good storytelling.

Rolling the dice for these actions doesn’t replace role-playing, it facilitates it. It allows players to specify that they’re being cautious or using their character’s expertise in traps without having to constantly say, “I prod ahead with my pole. I gently run my fingers along the wall looking for grooves or pressure plates. I take a half-step forward to see if there’s a pit trap.”

Now, why roll to Persuade or Charm or Seduce or Intimidate? Because it allows for fun gameplay and meaningful choice, that is, role-play.

Okay, so the players want to persuade a local constable to give them access to crime scene evidence. The players might come up with a perfectly logical argument why the constable should let them, and then have their most personable/charismatic player deliver the argument at the table. Why not just let them auto-succeed?

• Maybe the player with the most charisma isn’t playing the character with the most charisma. In that case, the decision for them to give the speech at the table isn’t role-playing, and I’m not going to reward the players for not role-playing.
• Maybe the constable isn’t a man driven entirely by logic. (Nobody is.) He can be swayed by logic, but it’s going to depend on how that logic was presented to him. A Persuade roll generates in-universe information for the GM about how well the argument was delivered.
• Failure is interesting. The constable wasn’t swayed? Maybe now you have to blackmail him. Or break into the police station. Or go above his head to the mayor/duke/king/whoever. These all open up new possibilities for exploration, role-play, combat, subterfuge, and character development.
• If the players know there’s a risk of failure, then they have to more carefully consider consequences and downsides. This is the stuff of real role-playing–would their character try to persuade the constable knowing that this would tip the police off to their investigation? Does one of the PCs think the risk makes it too great and they should try another plan first? It’s hard to make considerations like that when you know that the course of action in question is going to succeed.

This all holds true for any kind of social interaction. Failure isn’t always interesting, but it often is, and the possibility of failure is necessary for a choice to be meaningful. This could be as simple as “you fumbled a Charisma check to carouse at the masquerade ball; you still get to socialize and play-act the conversations, but you came off a little awkward and now the Duchess has a slightly negative opinion of you.”

But without the mechanics, this types of choice and consequence becomes either impossible or entirely dependent on the inscrutable and arbitrary whims of your GM.

Roll to Role-Play

Which brings us to the solution–roll to role-play.

It’s not an either/or proposition–rolling can enhance and inform roleplaying. Similarly, the numbers on the character sheet should inform your roleplaying, not stifle it.

If I’m playing a D&D-like (Shadowdark is my go-to) and my character has a 5 Intelligence, by God you’d better believe I’m playing that dumbass like a dumbass. That’s the character that’s going to present stupid ideas, take on enemies way stronger than they are, and blunder into traps if nobody else in the party stops them. If they have high Wisdom then they might have some more intuition, but if they’re also low there then they’re also going to be naive and easily manipulated.

Low-INT characters are also fun because they don’t know their limitations. If I have low-INT and also low Charisma then I might insist on trying to charm and persuade NPCs even though I suck at it (because I don’t know I suck at it).

This sounds like a fun character to play as long as my group isn’t full of min-maxers. If we play well together then they’ll figure out how to direct my idiot PC to tasks that they are good at, and they’ll be entertained when my dumbass PC does funny things (as long as I don’t overdo it or utterly ruin their plans).

On the other hand, if I have high Intelligence or Wisdom and low Charisma, then my character will be aware of their limitations and not try to seduce the handsome bard. If they’re physically weak, then they’re not going to be stupid enough to try to intimidate an ogre–the dumb guy might, though.

A lot of players seem to struggle conceptually with this (even if not in actual practice). OSR characters have an assumed level of competence (I’d say expertise actually) that obviates the need to roll for success, flattening the experience. It doesn’t matter what the character sheet says their Dexterity is; they’re a thief so they get to automatically disarm the trap or pick the lock. Doesn’t matter what they rolled for Wisdom; they said they searched the desk, so they found the hidden compartment.

This sucks.

Numbers are abstractions, and I think these players have a hard time concretizing what they mean in real-world terms. What does it actually mean to have a 12 Intelligence in D&D, for example?

(Note: I actually think the D&D ability score system is pretty bad at this. Older editions had the numbers mean different things depending on your class, which is extremely dissociative, and the newer ones have dead zones where, a few edge cases aside, a 14 Strength and a 15 Strength are identical. Not great! And that’s to say nothing of a range of 3-18 being completely unintuitive to most people. Other systems do this better, of course, but this is by far the most common.)

The trick here is to embrace the abstraction and find anchor points. You know that a 10-11 with no modifier is “average,” so a 12 (+1 modifier) is “above average.” We can all kind of conceptualize what someone of “above average intelligence” is like, right? Or someone who is stronger than average?

Characters in D&D and its offshoots tend to be super-heroic so they don’t actually make good baselines for what “average” is if you compare it to the real world. But they don’t really need to–we can all kind of just intuit that most people are basically average at most things, and then envision steps up and down from that baseline. These are our anchors. My character has a 14 Intelligence and yours has a 12. We know that your character is above-average in intelligence, and mine is even smarter than that.

That should be all we need to make interesting role-playing decisions.

Don’t get hung up on the numbers. They’re guidelines. If we know my character has a higher Charisma than yours, then we know that NPCs are more likely to gravitate towards my PC than yours.

This is also why I like skill systems, despite them being much-maligned in the OSR space.

I want to play a hardboiled detective-esque character; someone who notices tells and has been trained to always look for hidden things. Doesn’t it make more sense that my character is more likely to find the hidden compartment in the desk than the absent-minded wizard character, even if the wizard is technically “smarter”? Or the wizard’s player has more experience with the GM and knows that the GM expects the players to say something like “I look under the desk to see if there’s extra space at the back of the drawer”?

I think so. That’s where an Investigate or Search skill comes in handy.

Let’s look at a few ways I’d run that scene, using skill rolls to enhance roleplay.

• Player: I want to search that desk in the corner of the room.
• GM: Okay, give me a Search roll. (I compare it against a hidden DC; it fails.) You search the drawers and find ink and quills, a few shavings of metal, and some parchment and vellum in one of the drawers. Some of the parchment has alchemical formulae scrawled on it, but it looks like notes or brainstorming, not finished work.

All the stuff they found in the desk was the obvious, non-hidden stuff in the desk. The player has no idea they failed the check, they just know I asked for one. (They may guess based on a bad roll that they probably failed, but they won’t know unless you have some kind of automatic fail number, like 1 on 1d20.) But they still found stuff, so they’re not unsatisfied.

They could then go on to say:

• Player: Hmmm. I know their magic decanter should’ve been in this desk. Do I notice anything else?
• GM: What else would you be looking for?
• Player: Well…I rattle the desk around to see if I notice anything off, or hear anything heavy or metal thudding around in there. I also want to pull the drawers out to see if anything is behind them.
• GM: Yup, you pull the drawer with the parchment out and realize there’s a hidden compartment behind it.

No additional roll required. It’s the best of both worlds; the skill check told me that the player wasn’t perceptive or skilled enough at searching to automatically find the secret compartment in the course of a regular search, but the player’s (and character’s) knowledge of where the magic decanter should be made them suspicious and persistent enough to keep looking. In this case, I asked them to give me more specifics about how they’re looking, and their idea logically would’ve found the secret compartment, so they found it.

Here’s what this would look like if the dice had fallen differently:

• Player: I want to search that desk in the corner of the room.
• GM: Okay, give me a Search roll. (I compare it against a hidden DC; it succeeds.) You search the drawers and find ink and quills, a few shavings of metal, and some parchment and vellum in one of the drawers. Some of the parchment has alchemical formulae scrawled on it, but it looks like notes or brainstorming, not finished work. But as you’re closing the drawer, you faintly perceive a weird thud as it hits the back of the desk, and you notice that the drawer seems kind of short for how big the desk is.
• Player: Great! I pull the drawer out to see what’s back there.

Or, if you have an especially thick-skulled player.

• Player: The drawer seems short. Huh.
• GM: Yes. Do you want to look at it more closely?
• Player: Yeah, do I need to roll another Search check?
• GM: No, you already rolled it and noticed the suspicious drawer. Just tell me how you want to investigate it more deeply.

The player still has to narrate what exactly they’re doing, but the check delivered them the clue of where/how to look. Again, the best of both worlds: the player got to roll their skill check, and those points they put into Search to make their investigator character mattered. They got the clue, they noticed the detail that a lot of characters would miss, and they felt like a badass that they did. But they still had to then input their actions into the game world to bring it all home.

Let’s look at some social interactions to see some ways these principles can play out. Remember, we’re using the game mechanics and the numbers on our character sheet to inform and enhance our role-playing.

• Player: I want to ask Duke Gimlock if he can provide us with some horses and maybe some healing potions for our expedition to the dungeon.
• GM: Okay, tell me a little more, or tell me what you say.
• Player: Sure, yeah. *ahem* “Duke Gimlock! My compatriots and I are sworn to venture into the catacombs to retrieve your beloved cat Fluffy. We will uphold our vow in any case, but I humbly request that you grant us some horses to reach the catacomb entrace with haste, and that you ask your head alchemist to provide us with healing potions in case we have to fight for Fluffy’s freedom.”
• GM: Roll Diplomacy/Persuade, DC 15. (It succeeds.) The duke looks you up and down as you talk, but at the mention of his beloved cat, his face softens. “Ah, you are the ones that the reeve spoke of. Thank you for braving the catacombs for Fluffy. I will give you a writ to bring to my alchemist and he will provide you with whatever he can spare, and my horsemaster will gladly lend you some pack horses for the journey. Please return Fluffy to me, and I will see you rewarded.”

This one is easy, right? As soon as we saw that the check succeeded, we all knew what was going to happen, and having the GM reply in the duke’s voice is up to GM preference. This could’ve also looked like:

• Player: I want to ask Duke Gimlock if he can provide us with some horses and maybe some healing potions for our expedition to the dungeon.
• GM: Okay, tell me a little more, or tell me what you say.
• Player: Well, I just want to tell him that we’re the ones who are going to save his pet cat, and reassure him that we’re going on the quest no matter what, but just kind of ask if he can give us any resources to give us a better shot at saving Fluffy.
• GM: Roll Diplomacy/Persuade, DC 15. (It succeeds.) Cool, okay, the duke seems suspicious at first, but when you mention his cat he remembers the reeve told him some adventurers had volunteered to go rescue her, so he agrees. He gives you a writ to take to his alchemist for potions and says to see the horsemaster about horses.

This table isn’t as into the play-acting part of it, and that’s fine. The player still made an in-character decision–to use their charisma and etiquette to politely and humbly ask the duke for aid. Or maybe this duke isn’t actually that important of a character, and the GM and players would rather skip over the actual conversation to get to the fun part–saving Fluffy.

Note that these styles can also be mixed-and-matched, with the player actually delivering the speecn and the GM summarizing the duke’s reply, or vice-versa. The effect is the same. The player built a character who is good at talking and persuasion, and got to flex it here.

But what if the check had failed?

• Player: I want to ask Duke Gimlock if he can provide us with some horses and maybe some healing potions for our expedition to the dungeon.
• GM: Okay, tell me a little more, or tell me what you say.
• Player: Sure, yeah. *ahem* “Duke Gimlock! My compatriots and I are sworn to venture into the catacombs to retrieve your beloved cat Fluffy. We will uphold our vow in any case, but I humbly request that you grant us some horses to reach the catacomb entrace with haste, and that you ask your head alchemist to provide us with healing potions in case we have to fight for Fluffy’s freedom.”
• GM: Roll Diplomacy/Persuade, DC 15. (It fails.)
• Player: Shit.
• GM: The duke looks you up and down as you talk, his eyes narrowed. Want to tell me how you fucked up the speech?
• Player: Yeah, I tripped over my words, and forgot to stand with my hands behind my back when addressing a member of the nobility.
• GM: Awesome. Okay, so the duke says: (sneering voice) “Yes, the reeve spoke of you. You will receive payment after finding Fluffy, not before. If these terms are unacceptable to you, then I will find someone else to rescue Fluffy. My duchy is in no short supply of would-be heroes.” It’s pretty clear he’s not going to help you.

The player might not be happy in this moment, but once the initial sting of failure is over, the majority of the time they’ll look back fondly on moments like this. Maybe the party concludes that the duke is a huge asshole, and they’re going to find a new owner for Fluffy (or keep her for themselves). Maybe they’ll remember this the next time the duke comes crawling to them for help with a goblin incursion. Or maybe they’ll all look at the party’s thief and say, “Go wild.” The player should still have chances to succeed at diplomatic interactions because that’s the character they built, but failing once in a while is worthwhile. And, because the player remembered and used a bit of in-universe lore (“I forgot to stand with my hands behind my back”) then the next time they address the nobility they may specify that they make sure to do it this time, in which case I’d give them some kind of bonus. They learned from their failure and it gave them another chance to be awesome and succeed later.

You can also do things like this:

• GM: The goblins raise their swords and laugh at the suggestion that they should give you the Gem of Hakke. Their leader takes a swig of ale.
• Player 1: Okay, fuck these guys. I step forward, raising my staff, and say, “Give us the Gem or I’ll bring down this whole cave on top of you.”
• Player 2: Hang on, if you wanna go that route, my barbarian has +4 in Intimidate. Why don’t I try to scare them instead?
• Player 1: Okay, that’s fine.

Player 1 here wanted to scare the goblins, but they recognized that in the fiction of the game world as represented by the numbers on the character sheet, Player 2’s character is more likely to be the one to actually do that. Role-play, baby.

This doesn’t negate player or GM creativity. Consider the following alternative possibilities:

• GM: The goblins raise their swords and laugh at the suggestion that they should give you the Gem of Hakke. Their leader takes a swig of ale.
• Player 1: Okay, fuck these guys. I step forward, channeling some magic into my staff like I’m getting ready to cast a spell, and say, “Give us the Gem or I’ll bring down this whole cave on top of you.”
• Player 2: Hang on, if you wanna go that route, my barbarian has +4 in Intimidate. Why don’t I try to scare them instead?
• GM: Actually, these goblins are very scared of magic. Player1, I’ll let you roll that Intimidate with advantage for thinking to light up your staff.
• Player 2: Oh, word, go right ahead then.

Or:

• GM: The goblins raise their swords and laugh at the suggestion that they should give you the Gem of Hakke. Their leader takes a swig of ale.
• Player 1: Okay, fuck these guys. I step forward, channeling some magic into my staff like I’m getting ready to cast a spell, and say, “Give us the Gem or I’ll bring down this whole cave on top of you.”
• Player 2: Hang on, if you wanna go that route, my barbarian has +4 in Intimidate. Why don’t I try to scare them instead?
• GM: I’ll let you roll the check together. Player1, you roll, and you can add Player2’s Intimidate bonus to your roll. Both of you tell me what you do.
• Player 1: I step forward, surging energy into my staff.
• Player 2: And my barbarian steps up beside her, raising licking the blade of his axe maniacally.

In both cases there’s still a risk of failure, but it’s much smaller due to player creativity and role-play. We took the numbers on the character sheet and used them to make good role-playing.

There is almost no situation at the gaming table where you can’t do things this. And, I submit, if you start doing things like this, you will find your experiences greatly enhanced. You might come to see why some of us like a little crunch in our game mechanics, like having skill systems, like rolling dice for searching and intimidating and what-have-you. This is going to require a creative and skilled GM, and buy-in from the players, but I promise it’s worth it.

Every number on the character sheet, every feat or perk or skill or spell or proficiency, tells a story. Maybe that +2 in sneaking or stealth comes from my character having to learn to hide from an abusive parent as a child. I have a high constitution because my character has been exposed to so many viruses and illnesses from my travels around the world. I have a +1 in Appraise because my character spent a couple summers in college working in an antiques store. Perform because I used to be in an improv troupe. Etc., etc., etc. These aren’t mechanics getting in the way of role-playing or creating a backstory–they’re prompts.

At the very least, even if you decide that this style of play isn’t right for you and you really do prefer GM fiat or assumed mastery or whatever, try to understand that it isn’t the One True Way to roleplay. I’d personally love to see a world where OSR play can be defined by lethality, strong game structures, and open-endedness rather than “not having a skill system” or “relying on GM fiat a lot.”

And please, for the love of God, stop saying “roleplay, not roll-play!” as a gotcha.