Community

Aug 20, 2012 -- 3:23PM, Pashalik_Mons wrote:

Aug 20, 2012 -- 2:31PM, mvincent wrote:

It's a subjective issue, so I can readily accept anyone's viewpoint that 4e hasn't reduced (or has even enhanced) the amount of role-playing they do.

But I also know that a large amount of players (and many of the writers) have stated otherwise. Even if I'm speaking anecdotally about my own groups and players I've talked to... it's still a pretty large sampling (I run two regular, long running games, play in another, participate in many public games, and am active in conventions, local events and LFR). The number of players that have an issue with this is statistically relevant even if one's own group does not.

By that metric(the metric of "but a lot of people think so") we should be putting much more serious inquiry into whether the moon landing was faked and whether or not aliens built the sphinx.

Is that what you got from the sources I mentioned? That hardly seems like a fair and accurate assessment.

My point is that if large numbers of people are good at something, it's grabbing an idea and holding on to it, not actually evaluating the truth or falsehood of that idea. 

You don't know me or my background in D&D... but I believe it to be both deep and unbiased. In these forums I tend to be the voice of acceptance towards all viewpoints. See the rules Q&A forum FAQ and the Gamma World FAQ for examples. I always try to use consensus (i.e. majority) answers, even when they go against my own thoughts on the matter. Indeed, I love it when I learn something new or find out about a new majority preference.

However, your above reply does not seem to reflect the same sort of openess to me.

Aug 20, 2012 -- 5:03PM, mvincent wrote:

Aug 20, 2012 -- 4:51PM, mvincent wrote:

a large amount of players (and many of the writers) have stated otherwise.

Citing one source as an example:
'As they begin this new project, Wizards staff are acutely aware of how changes can go wrong; The fourth edition rules, released in 2008, upset many long-time players, who felt it borrowed too heavily from online RPGs like Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, pushing creative play aside in favor of repetitive combat.

“With fourth edition, there was a huge focus on mechanics,” says Mearls. “The story was still there, but a lot of our customers were having trouble getting to it.”

“In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’” says Mearls. “But there’s other ways to play guitar.”

This time around, Wizards doesn’t want to make the same mistake.'

WotC (and Mike Mearls) have access to the greatest amount of player feedback out there. Far more than any of us.

Irrelevant, WotC is renowned for ignoring feedback. Mearls wants to make 4e more like 2/3.x because 1. He personally is not good at tactical combat and mechanical optimization, and 2. Hasbro/Marketing tells him that he will make more money by hedging the grogs back to d&d from pathfinder and other ogl games.

"4e D&D has no roleplaying" is entirely a marketing construct initiated by Paizo and the "I HATE CHANGE" 3.x supporters (who complained about 3.x when it came out to replace 2e), and WotC has since so-opted it as rationale for Next, even though it was their failure to market 4e's superior combat play and thus a reduction in the RP:Combat per session as a major selling point to draw in the wargamer audience, as well as their failure to publish respectable fluff to go with 4e - PoL is essentially Fluff-less, and they killed off all the major plots people knew in Faerun. While 4e has a much better platform for building your characters character, there's little structural support. By which I mean that in a home campaign it's more difficult to tie your character into the story, it's more difficult to say that your character fought at the Battle of the Trarg against the Ovinomancer and are a member of the Golden Keys, if you don't know that any of those things actually existed, and new DMs aren't going to be as able to just randomly work that into their world on the fly. The structural support of History and tools that hold good roleplayers and experienced DMs back (and they'll break them when convenient, ex. Spellcasting Refluffs) are rather necessary for new groups to develop character immersion, Themes help a lot, but were added far too late to dispell the No RP myth.

I love the "no RP" discussions though, it reveals the fakes in the Roleplayer crowd, the people who just like to come up with backstories for their mary sue and wallow their way through both rp and combat encounters, only coming up with "that cool thing their character did" to tell their friends about a couple days later like some juvenile comeback after a schoolyard fight. Not that everyone is like this, others just have some absurd stigma about being good at combat OR rp and not being able to mix them (there's actually a thread about rolled stats vs point buy where several people claim rolling is better because it gives you the chance to roleplay as a character that isn't a bada**, as if the two were remotely connected). It is impossible to create rules that prevent you from roleplaying without outright saying "no roleplaying", just ask any child who likes to 'make believe'.

If you can't RP in 4e, you're not a real Roleplayer.