sinecure said:
The 4E rules specifically require you to stop think like your another person and start playing the game as a push button, highly limited option, no influence to think outside the box, simulation.
Is this claim based on play experience, reading of the rules, or rumour?
I haven't played 4e. I am in the process of reading the rules. And I have followed all the rumours. So far nothing about I have read or heard gives me any reason to think that what you are saying is true.
Playing out my attack powers in 4e looks like it should be just as expressive of my PC as working out an extended contest in HeroWars - both require making mechanically optimal choices, and the build of my character will have designed so that making and implementing those choices expresses the themes that I think are important for my character.
Which reminds me - do you include HeroWars, The Dying Earth, TRoS, etc - that is, some of the games that 4e seems to me to most resemble - in your list of non-RPGs?
sinecure said:
100's of powers for combat. Absolutely no variation in implementation.
What? The powers use different stats, have different consequences, require different actions to use, intereact in complex ways. This is what makes 4e combat thematically expressive in a way that earlier editions of D&D never have been.
sinecure said:
BTW, think for all those 100s of powers and feats they have for combat they might add some for non-combat? You know, just for fun? You mention utility powers. Do you really equate these with the new non-combat play?
Utility powers do factor into skill challenges. So do skills.
sinecure said:
Except when you can't. Like, I grab his skull and gnaw on it! "What power is that?" None. So guess what? The chance of it working is nil. And if it can work, why do you need all those powers to begin with? You're not thinking in character. You're thinking in combat maneuvers akin to any other wargame. Chess.
<snip>
You can do this in 2nd Edition if you want. We call it improvisation.
This is bizarre. No edition of D&D gives rules for gnawing on a foe's skull. 4e has rules for improvised attacks (PHB pp 215, 219), but such attacks are never optimal (no proficiency bonus, d4 damage). HeroWars has the capacity to handle skull-gnawing as a viable attack option, because of the abstract character of contest resolution in that game, and also the fact that (more than many other games) it allows non-physical considerations (such as the spritual or emotional importance of skull-gnawing) to factor into the resolution of combat. 2nd ed AD&D does not have any of the mechanical features of HeroWars that make this approach feasible. If you are playing an AD&D game in which it is ever optimal, in combat, for a PC to gnaw on a foe's skull you're using a lot of house rules. And if you want your PCs to gnaw on skulls even though it's suboptimal in combat, then 4e allows it as well as any other version of D&D via the above-mentioned rules for improvised attacks.
sinecure said:
2nd includes rules for a ton of different things. Just look at all option in the three main books and in the additional books. They don't include feats and powers in the Castles Book. Or repetitiously dull magic items in the magic encyclopaedias. 2E is jam packed full of actual stuff that makes sense.
Look, if you were talking about RQ or RM and saying that 4e lacks the same degree of support for out-of-combat play, I might have a bit of sympathy. I am a long-time Rolemaster GM who is becoming increasingly attracted to the 4e way of handling this stuff (via skill challenges) but I certainly see the attraction and intricate beauty of well-designed simulationist action resolution.
But 2nd ed AD&D? The game's mechanics are an inchorenent shambles, both for combat and non-combat action resolution. And it's not saved by that Castles book, which (IMO) adds very little to the 1st ed DMG read in conjunction with a couple of medieval history texts. You may as well say that AD&D has great rules because I can watch Life on Earth and work out new tricks for my pet Carnivorous Ape to perform.
sinecure said:
As a D&D roleplayer achieving ones goals is the definition of a good roleplayer. One who wins. When playing a module this means beating it.
The most interesting D&D modules I have seen for many years are some of the Penumbra modules for 3E; I am hoping to run these adventures sometime fairly soon, either in HARP or 4e.
Most of them are designed so that they do not railroad the PCs into taking one approach or another, and they leave it open for the players to decide who they will treat as the villains, and who as their allies (this is very unusual in a D&D module). In this sort of module, what does it mean to "beat it"? And if (as I suspect) "beating it" makes no sense, what does that do to your criteria for good roleplaying?
