We summoned a devil once. All we used was the D&D books, too. It was pretty kwazy.
God of Arrested Development and Intelligence Resident Left Hand of Stalin and Banana Stand Grandstander Pie-Cooling-On-A-Windowsill of the House of Trolls In the morning HK'll be sober but you'll still be a meatbag. I know I misspell "Danke" in my posts. It's an inside joke. "Ten cents gets you nuts." -George Michael Spoiler:Show
''Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.'' —Bill Clinton
You are not a moral man. There are not enough middle fingers in the world for you.
"Heroes"...I wish I had those. I remember in my first-ever campaign one PC went around shootin all the unconscious baddies in the head to gain Dark Side Points...
Whaaaaaat?!??
Wow...way to waste perfectly good potential slaves.
Er...no wait I mean..uh...something not evil!
(Quotes screwed up on the next one, won't give the poster's name. It's in the Best Lines thread on the D&D forum)
First, an experience from a game I played in a few years back. Our DM didn't like 3.5 as a whole but liked parts of it. So he hands us a big ass rules packet for his modified FR campaign, complete with quotes from important NPC's on the front. I can't remember most of the HRs, just that some how gods like Cyric and Bhaal existed at the same time, despite the obvious problems there. In the end the game became a problem more because of the railroading than the HRs, but it ended with this classic line, after our ranger tried to disarm the strange woman following us WITH HIS BOW: DM: You just killed (insert random noble sounding name here) JP: Was she important? Jack: Dude, she's quoted on the front of the rules packet!
"Why in the wide,wide, world of all things irrational would I help you? -Daniel Jackson "Fun will now commence." -Seven of Nine
Cut the last encounter on your way out after dealing with the Darth. He's the BBEG. Treat him as such. Play up that Darth Revan is THAT much of a badarse. When the shuttle landed, I had no less than 13 JEDI MASTERS step off the shuttle. The PCs were slack-jawed. After the meetup with Bastila (as she's carrying Revan's body), only TWO jedi masters remained with her. Let me tell you, the player whining about not getting to fight Revan himself shut up pretty quickly when he saw that.
1. Cleric cast protection from fire on Tank. 2. Tank goes in and get surrounded by enemies. 3. Wizard cast fireball and blows them up. 4. ??? 5. Profit
I go by the saying," If it ain't friendly fire then it's not working."
So, let me see if I understand your point, Toki....
Because 4E has clear and engaging rules for combat, and because 4E players and DM's tend to have fun during combat encounters, it creates a dynamic in which combat pushes role play to the side. Is that it?
Yes, thank you. That is an excellent restatement of my earlier proposition of "how about if we say something like "4e did combat so awesomely that now all my group wants to do is run combat scenarios!!". Would you accept that statement?"
However one wishes to look at it, there is a roleplaying issue. D&D is a social game. So even if you believe the issue exists only in the mind of players you feel should know better: that issue still exists.
Arguing against it doesn't actually make it go away. Mechanics do influence play style. Of course you can overcome that influence, but that doesn't mean the influence doesn't even exist. And we can still love an edition while acknowledging a downside.
Okay, I think that's a reasonable premise. However, I don't think combat being fun and awesome can reasonably be considered to be a failing of the game. The challenge is what to do with role play.
At a group level, a group can tackle this in one of three ways. First, they can decide "Hey, awesome skirmish game is awesome. We're happy with it as is." Second, they can decide to play some other system, with more fun role playing rules. (For the record, I don't think any previous edition of D&D qualifies. I'm intrigued by Fate/Dresden Files and Fiasco. But that's just my opinion.) Third, they can see what they can do to make role play more fun and engaging.
Now, for many groups, that's simple. You role play more. You include narration into your fights. You speak in character. You do the things that role players do. 4E players tend to include D&D veterans or LARPers or theater buffs or other creative minds that don't really need help.
For other groups, you can certainly look into the tools that the greater 4E offerings provide. Fluff and technique are included in the books, especially DMG2. Listen to some live play/podcast games. Read some blogs. The DM really has to set the tone here, ideally with the help of one or two players to set an example.
And of course, you can tinker with hybridizing some ideas from other systems. I'd love to figure out a way to create a 4E/Fate hybrid. (Which, of course, leads me to believe that it's probably already on the Internet somewhere.) That might not be your cup of tea, but something could work.
tl:dr - 4E combat is awesome. The solution to better role play isn't to make 4E combat less awesome. It's to make 4E role play equally awesome. And that should be at the group level, not the system level, because clearly some groups are already succeeding at this.
tl:dr - 4E combat is awesome. The solution to better role play isn't to make 4E combat less awesome. It's to make 4E role play equally awesome. And that should be at the group level, not the system level, because clearly some groups are already succeeding at this.
This is basically Eeverything I've been saying for the whole thread, you summarized it very well.
EDIT: I doubt I'll ever understand the quote system....
We summoned a devil once. All we used was the D&D books, too. It was pretty kwazy.
God of Arrested Development and Intelligence Resident Left Hand of Stalin and Banana Stand Grandstander Pie-Cooling-On-A-Windowsill of the House of Trolls In the morning HK'll be sober but you'll still be a meatbag. I know I misspell "Danke" in my posts. It's an inside joke. "Ten cents gets you nuts." -George Michael Spoiler:Show
''Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.'' —Bill Clinton
You are not a moral man. There are not enough middle fingers in the world for you.
"Heroes"...I wish I had those. I remember in my first-ever campaign one PC went around shootin all the unconscious baddies in the head to gain Dark Side Points...
Whaaaaaat?!??
Wow...way to waste perfectly good potential slaves.
Er...no wait I mean..uh...something not evil!
(Quotes screwed up on the next one, won't give the poster's name. It's in the Best Lines thread on the D&D forum)
First, an experience from a game I played in a few years back. Our DM didn't like 3.5 as a whole but liked parts of it. So he hands us a big ass rules packet for his modified FR campaign, complete with quotes from important NPC's on the front. I can't remember most of the HRs, just that some how gods like Cyric and Bhaal existed at the same time, despite the obvious problems there. In the end the game became a problem more because of the railroading than the HRs, but it ended with this classic line, after our ranger tried to disarm the strange woman following us WITH HIS BOW: DM: You just killed (insert random noble sounding name here) JP: Was she important? Jack: Dude, she's quoted on the front of the rules packet!
"Why in the wide,wide, world of all things irrational would I help you? -Daniel Jackson "Fun will now commence." -Seven of Nine
Cut the last encounter on your way out after dealing with the Darth. He's the BBEG. Treat him as such. Play up that Darth Revan is THAT much of a badarse. When the shuttle landed, I had no less than 13 JEDI MASTERS step off the shuttle. The PCs were slack-jawed. After the meetup with Bastila (as she's carrying Revan's body), only TWO jedi masters remained with her. Let me tell you, the player whining about not getting to fight Revan himself shut up pretty quickly when he saw that.
1. Cleric cast protection from fire on Tank. 2. Tank goes in and get surrounded by enemies. 3. Wizard cast fireball and blows them up. 4. ??? 5. Profit
I go by the saying," If it ain't friendly fire then it's not working."
Okay, I think that's a reasonable premise. However, I don't think combat being fun and awesome can reasonably be considered to be a failing of the game.
Agreed. But now everyone is on the same page that mechanics can effect playing style (a premise I hadn't expected resistance to).
However: awesomeness can be subjective. So imagine some players that didn't think 4e's combat was so awesome. Now imagine their perspective of a 'dynamic in which combat pushes role play to the side'.
Now consider how they might view power descriptions as being mainly just mechanical effects (promoting resistance from others if the want use them as something else... 'powers do what they say they do'). And imagine how they might view published combat encounters being presented as discrete set-piece battles (much like board games), causing their DM to resist notions of altering the start conditions.
Now can you understand why there are so many players with a viewpoint that you know in your heart is wrong? These are subjective issues, but D&D is a social game, so right or wrong, your considerations of the game are absolutely valid, as are others'.
No, I do not believe mechanics are the cause of the problem. And that's not what JRedGiant1 said either. He said that the games mechanics are not the cause of the problem and that instead the problem comes from group level since some groups clearly have no problem with this issue.
And quoting only a part of a persons response and taking it out of context is not proper quoting... Unless you just didn't read the full response in which case you should just check out the TL;DR at the bottom which explains the full response in a smaller format:
"tl:dr - 4E combat is awesome. The solution to better role play isn't to make 4E combat less awesome. It's to make 4E role play equally awesome. And that should be at the group level, not the system level, because clearly some groups are already succeeding at this."
"Non nobis Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam"
"I wish for death not because I want to die, but because I seek the war eternal"
I will agree that if you aren't finding the "awesome" in 4E combat, then yeah, it's probably not the game for you. Just like if you don't find the awesome in the melted cheese and sauce of chicken parmasean, it's probably not the dish for you. But that doesn't mean it isn't chicken.
The idea that powers are just mechanical effects seems...strange to me, given that every power has an evocative name and fluff text. Yes, after that, they are codified in an attempt to remove ambiguity. That being said, the game is better when players step up and make the narrative of the power their own.
My enchanter doesn't use Shield. He bends the attackers perceptions of reality, forcing them to miss. My epic level eladrin warlord multiclasses into monk. Instead of using Flurry of Blows, he teleports to be stabbing his spear in 8 directions at once. My artificer|warlord doesn't use Reorient the Axis. He's an incompetent coward who just peed himself...his allies are grossed out and can shift 7 to get away from the...ewwww....smell.
Okay, yeah, that last one proves I'm kind of a nine year old.
The point is,where some see bare mechanical effects, others see raw canvas on which they can paint the narrative of their character.
This is one technique I have been using to infuse story and role play into 4E combat. I would love to hear what others have been doing.
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.
Thank you for making my day, sir. And of course, I have to use this thread as an excuse to post this thing again:
OD&D, 1E and 2E challenged the player. 3E challenged the character, not the player. Now 4E takes it a step further by challenging a GROUP OF PLAYERS to work together as a TEAM. That's why I love 4E.
"Your ability to summon a horde of celestial superbeings at will is making my ... BMX skills look a bit redundant."
However: awesomeness can be subjective. So imagine some players that didn't think 4e's combat was so awesome. Now imagine their perspective of a 'dynamic in which combat pushes role play to the side'.
If the dynamic is "people like the combat, so they do it more, and this is what pushes RP to the side" then if people didn't like the combat, that dynamic breaks apart. They would not seek to do more combat, and thus it would not be able to push RP to the side.
Seriously, though, you should check out the PbP Haven. You might also like Real Adventures, IF you're cool.
Knights of W.T.F.- Silver Spur Winner
4enclave, a place where 4e fans can talk 4e in peace.
