Kzach said:
4e is dry and boring and nonsensical
I keep seeing the same criticisms over and over and over again by (usually) the same people. I'm finally convinced that they're right: 4e is everything they say it is.
Well, I don't think it's any more dry and boring and nonsensical than most other editions, myself, at least in the rulebooks. A stablock is kind of flavorless regardless of the format, but there are other places to inject flavor, and I think 4e uses those as well as any other edition does, by and large.
To my mind, if the 4e rules were meant to be taken and used completely literally without narrative interpretation and imaginative involvement of the players and DM in creating a co-operative story environment, then it would be really boring and it would be very dry and none of the rules would make any sense.
Well, which brings us to the underlying truism about any PnP RPG: The game is only as good as the group running it. This is as true for FATAL as it is for D&D 4e, though.
I realised years ago that I had been missing out on one of the coolest and most fun aspects of roleplaying by adhering to this notion that a game system has to be 'realistic'. The amount of rules I made up to represent hit points and wounds in D&D could fill a small book.
You don't have to have a lot of detailed rules to maintain suspension of disbelief. VP/WP, for instance, isn't very complex. HP has been pretty poorly defined in every edition, so that, at least, isn't a new issue for those who find it breaks their suspension of disbelief (though it's a little different in 4e than it was before). There's a continuum here, and it's certainly possible to have HP be "more realistic," if that's what you want, than they currently are, without having a small book of additional rules.
4e requires you to be imaginative because if you don't, then things start to make very little sense. I'm not saying you can't be imaginative in other systems, just that without some sort of imaginative element, 4e quickly becomes very dry and mechanical and logic breaks down almost immediately.
"4e is only good in the hands of a good group?" If that's true, that's kind of a tragedy, since 4e certainly wanted to be easy enough for ANY group, not just the few ones with a DM who is good at turning dry stuff into interesting stuff.
Shouldn't 4e have tried to be interesting right up front, not demanding that DMs be interesting first? Wouldn't that have made it more accessible, and still allow DMs who have interesting ideas to do their own things (since the DM is always the final arbiter)?
For the naysayers, I say: try it. Just let yourself go. Put the book down and roleplay through the combats with descriptive verses about how you use Tide of Iron to force someone over a cliff or Positioning Strike to weave through the battlefield or Rain of Steel to cleave about you mercilessly. Be imaginative.
Man, knocking someone off a cliff is
hard in 4e. Aside from not being able to push people more than one square off the edge (you can't force movement to somewhere you can't move normally to), they then get a saving throw to go prone instead of to fall off (50% chance).
So first you've gotta hit them (maybe 60% chance), then you've gotta move 'em into the empty space (depends on the power how easy that is), then they STILL get a chance to not get boned (50% chance).
I mean, 4e can certainly throw up some barriers to awesomeness. A good group will probably ignore those barriers when they conflict with awesomeness, but that's true in any edition of D&D, or in any PnP RPG, period. If I've got a good group, and we're happy playing Pathfinder, maybe, what's 4e gonna do? Say "Hey, you can have the same fun you're having now by learning a brand new ruleset and being forced to be creative, even when your mind is feeling lazy from 48 hours of Recession-week work?"
Man, maybe I should just go play Diablo. It's certainly less friggin'
work.
