Do you like role playing or roll playing?

Years ago, I ran Keep on the Borderlands for my University of Minnesota group.  My players started talking with the kobolds about their lives in the caves.  My PCs convinced the kobolds to take what little treasure and equipment they had, and move away from these low resources, high danger caves; and then became sharecroppers for the Keep.  Their fields encircled the keep that I named Gary Gygax Keep, a famous knight of Law that, along with his soldiers of mixed species and genders, had expanded the lands of law to include the land where the keep was built upon.

The kobolds, with assistance from Keep subjects, built modest and underground homes, an underground root cellar to keep their food and beer cold, an above ground barn for their farm animals, and a waterwheel powered grain mill by the river.  They also built a harbor with a wharf and warehouse, for shipping goods and people by boat.

My players’ future plan was to recruit other species from the caves to increase the farmlands while diminishing the threat of the Caves to the Keep.  To quote my players, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends with them?”  But, university graduation and summer jobs stopped our adventure that never restarted.

The reason why my Kobolds changed alignment from Chaos to Law happened when my player character bard persuaded the Kobolds that it was not worth following the creed of Chaos. My party’s bard spoke to the Kobolds, “Why do you follow the creed of Evil, when all the members of your tribe ever get is being treated as underpaid or unpaid slaves at best, and as emergency food or blood sacrifices on an Evil altar at worst?”

I see that having my Kobolds hardwired to always be of Chaos means that my Kobolds will always react in the same way. This will lead to dull role-playing while turning encounters with these creatures into farming for experience points, instead of role playing. Thus, I give out the same amount of experience points if my party persuades their enemies to become friendly with the party and the inhabitants of Gygax Keep as if they had defeated them in combat.  That is an example of role playing characters, instead of roll playing dice.  As for experience point farming, my campaign has goblins, ogres, and the undead to name a few.

Note:  When the player characters destroy the Chaos shrine, by breaking that sacrificial altar, both the law and chaos immortals would take notice of the player characters.  How will that attention from immortals impact the lives of the player characters?