Do you role-play in MP games and why or why not?

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Omnirizon: Thanks for you thought provoking post on metagaming. I have to think about this a bit more. It seems like there are two separate, but somewhat related things here, role-playing and playing fair. One the one hand, I think it is possible to play the game fairly without role-playing, in the sense of imagining your pretender god and nation as a character and acting with this in mind.

However you could also argue that playing the game fairly is a type of role-playing too, for instance, not planning to attack someone simply because they are going AI or stale. You also make a good point about modern game theory. After all, in the typical Dom 3 game, I think everyone is doing their utmost to minimax their advantages in order to win, so this is where things get tricky, going back to the point about spending extra design points to create a more thematically correct pretender. Mostly I'm mulling over options for making the game more fun, and preserving some of the story in a game where minimaxing and thematic correctness can be competing goals. The third dimension I suppose is cheating and well, cheating is just plain bad. Anyway, back to mulling.