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Dec 9, 2011 -- 6:15PM, Macabre13 wrote:

This movie talk crap is super boring.  I hate trying to say anything productive then it gets buried under discussion about Rocky V or Legolas or something.  If it's not to establish tone, then you're probably not creating very good gameplay design discussion.

It's just that samurai movie combat romantacism I think is 4Es worst fault.  I want a story to tell, not "and then I used a daily on him!"  Not even in a narrativist sense, just "I did something cool, check it out," or "man, Kyle dropped the sickest burn when we were fighting that Vampire Monkey."

Combat is just a step on the story road.  Individual sword swings are supposed to be glossed over. 

I don't even understand what in the heck you're getting on about man. D&D has ALWAYS had those kind of moments and they have practically always turned on some player unleashing some limited PC resource. In the past it was a wizard daily spell, or a cleric spell, or a druid going all medieval on someone with a spell, or a character using a magic item power (which was basically something a whole lot like a spell if not outright a spell), etc. Now, there are RPGs out there where that sort of thing generally doesn't exist (I'm thinking of Traveller as a fairly well-known system that generally lacks that sort of mechanics, but there are many other examples like CoC). Very few of those games are FRPGs though because essentially as soon as you get into fantasy territory where characters can have awesome and unusual powers there is a need to ration or pace the use of those powers lest they simply be infinitely repeatable win buttons and lose all of their real impact. The problem with 'let the dice fall as they may' is that chances are the dice will run hot at some uninteresting and non-climactic moment in the story, say when the character is engaging some fairly trivial mook or performing some relatively insignificant task that is only indirectly related to the plot.

I'd also point out that 4e is still a game that includes quite a bit of random chance. I've seen all sorts of cool and awesome action emerge organically from play. I've also seen plenty of times when a player went all out and their grand plan fell flat, and then they had to get even more creative and scramble and make up something new on the spot, or I turned it into a 'from the frying pan into the fire' kind of moment. This stuff can and does certainly happen in systems that lack character resources too of course, but just because PCs have daily powers doesn't stop it from happening in 4e. I'd also point out additionally that one shouldn't put TOO much weight on daily powers. By 12th level every PC in the party has 3 of those (and probably a couple item ones too) as well as at least a couple APs. The game pretty much factors in their impact and you find that while a 1st level PC unleashing a daily is probably a big deal a paragon character doing the same thing is more just a bit of a knock back for the enemy that they often roll back from to raise things another notch. It becomes much more of a 'double down' kind of situation than some kind of ultimate kill move.

Dec 9, 2011 -- 7:53PM, Shasarak wrote:

Dec 9, 2011 -- 7:06PM, GreyICE wrote:

Dec 9, 2011 -- 6:22PM, Shasarak wrote:

Not sure who you are arguing with here.  It was me who said not to apply mechanical terms to flavour:

in 4e you have the mechanics first then the narrative not the other way around.

You even quoted it.

not what I said, please don't represent me.

I said 4th mechanics were described mechanically.

This does not mean they are "more important" than role playing.  It means WotC has drawn a clear distinction between "text that tells you how a power works" and "text that describes what a player does."

You can like it or dislike it but you can't say that there was no issue there.  Often the gap between "RAW" and "RAI" was caused by poor descriptors and "flavorful" approach to describing powers caused a fair bit of that.

Now please don't lie about what I wrote. 

I would not say lie.  But I would continue to ask if you quoted the right person.

I think that if you have to roll a die, then the mechanics are more important then roleplaying.

I'm so confused right now.

What was the d&d edition where I didn't roll dice?

Dec 9, 2011 -- 9:25PM, Morthion wrote:

Okay, let me see if I get what Macabre13 is saying here:

If a statistically significant portion of those who came to 4E from other RPGs saw their Roleplaying quality or quantity going down in 4E, we would have a basis for saying that 4E discourages roleplaying.  Is that it, or am I missing something?

If that is what he's saying, it doesn't make any sense (and doesn't take into account groups like mine whose roleplaying quality and quantity has improved significantly).