Push-button Role-playing

I recently chanced upon someone who was role-playing.  I was excited to see this, so I hung around and observed.  As I watched, I noted that some of this individual's actions were being repeated.  And repeated.  Randomly repeated.  This person was AFK and running a macro.

This was slightly disheartening to witness, and it lead me to reflect upon my (overly ambitious) plans to create Story NPCs.  One of the great thing about CL stories is not so much the plot, but it's the interaction between the characters.  It's fun to see the players' reaction to a developing situation or to have them match wits against a wily antagonist.  No matter how skilled the GM, I doubt that players would react the same way to a scripted NPC.  In fact, they would probably react to a scripted Story NPC the same way that I reacted to the scripted role-player.

Skirwan had a pretty good observation between macros and scripts:

Macroing is a Good Thing -- it saves typing, and lets people participate in the world at a more reasonable speed than if they had to type out "/action waves." every time.  Scripting is a Bad Thing -- it separates the player from the character and the game, and almost invariably hurts the game environment in the process.

I think that his comment applies to GMs just as much as it does to players.  Story NPCs could be a good way to spread some basic information, but NPCs should not be a substitute for good ol' fashioned organic role-playing.