So I'm building a tabletop RPG

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>>50677735
>So I'm building a tabletop RPG

There are a few approaches to mechanically rewarding roleplaying.
1) Awarding XP like you mentioned
2) Awarding metacurrency that players can spend to change the game (e.g. change a failed roll into a successful one, add a useful feature to the scene, etc.)
3) Saying "fuck it" and give roleplaying reward to roleplayers. If someone doesn't want to roleplay, mechanical incentives only draw out the most shallow and half-assed roleplaying out of rollplayers. If someone does want to roleplay, then they're probably going to enjoy RP rewards like the blessing of a duchess or something that makes sense in-story and not need hard mechanical rewards.

Don't devote 75% of the rules to combat

>>50677851
Well I've already wasted months on it so might as well finish it.
>>50677931
Might just have to do option 3. Ive had success with punishing stupid ideas in combat by making combat as brutal as possible. But i dont think theres a way to do that with roleplaying without it just being the GM doing that.
>>50677952
Well I'm trying. Unfortunately we've only ever really played d&d and pathfinder. So I'm not really all that good at visualizing ways to build the not combat related rules. Probably need to get gud at that seeing as its intended to threat combat as a failure state.

Post what you have otherwise we don't care.

>>50677735
You're welcome to /gdg/ --> >>50665636

But on this thread I can say that the subtlest and easiest way to go about is to avoid being direct with what characters can and cannot do, in the absolute sense.

Having a huge list of skills make players often just say "I'mma use my Dickfiddling (AGI) skill", or something to the same effect. Try to break the player's idea of the character as a sum of numbers but rather as something emergent that comes from the paper.

This opinion is biased™ towards lighter systems and I know it.

>>50678133
To explain that a bit, think of it as making a game that a computer would not understand (at least, on today's standards). When problems (and their solutions) are computational enough, players often devolve to just solving the problem computationally instead of narratively.

Of course, a natural roleplayer will just keep roleplaying like it's no one's business, but even a "swinger" player (can be both computational or narrative depending on situation) can easily just say "I roll to dickfiddle" if the problem can simply be solved with dickfiddling skill.

This thought process (no matter how flawed it is in the long run) made me remove skills entirely from my games, instead running it with attributes and personal, situational modifiers (Like, a character afraid of spiders is not gonna fare well fighting a giant spider, or a skilled marksman will have less problems with shooting something couple of hundred feet away).

When your character sheet has things that are APPLICABLE (Like, character uses their circus background to balance on a high platform), but not direct (dickfiddling™), the players are forced to think of their character AT LEAST as a sum of traits instead of a sum of numbers.

Of course, this doesn't always equate to roleplaying per se, but it at least veers closer to it, when players need to explain things they do with their own words instead of just saying [skill name].