D&D 4E 4E Rules first Role-Play second?

[Ruin Explorer]

With all our hopes and dreams invested on 4th Edition my greatest fear is that the books will avoid the "Role-Play" interaction that is so vital to many campaigns. If you think about it they call MMO's "Role-Playing Games" but there is little interaction. The games just involve killing things, grabbing loot, creating items, and performing quests that have already been done 1000 times before. With table top RPGs the game caters to the players. You as the player in D&D get to be in the spot light. You are the star!

I hope the rules are great but I also hope that the books speak directly to the issue of how to create a character based on the idea of "Role-Play" not min-max for rules and character advancement.

What is your take on this topic? So far from what I have read and heard the designers seem to be engaged it this type of game but then again they might naturally bring this kind of play to the game table.

I look at it this way. It's D&D. That's just the way it is.

2E took, compared to 1E, a course distinctly towards RP.

3E turned the ship around, hit the warp engines, and headed directly towards "rules and balance", with nary a thought about RP. Indeed, I remember the original 3E PHB barely even mentioned that your character might y'know, have a personality or a background or whatever. I was quite irked about ti at the time.

I got over it though.

Whilst players who are self-introduced to D&D are going to make some amazingly personality-free characters (admittedly 3.5E was a little better on this) first few times around, if the group tends towards RP, it'll get there eventually, and the amount of RP in existing groups is extremely unlikely to decrease as a result of failure of the books to mention it.

What with the "roles" and so on, RP is more or less certain to be sidelined at least as much as 3E, but I think we'll survive regardless.

 

[apoptosis]

I understand your point completely and respect your opinion. But personally I do feel that the current direction of focusing almost solely on mechanics while including little that actually promotes RP does have a negative impact on that part of the game.

Unlike Changeling that has a predetermined setting, having a game (like D&D) that can be used for many different genres can make it difficult to incorporate RP elements into the core rules. But maybe they can be included in the setting material?

Shadow of Yesterday, Burning Wheel and Sorcerer actually has role-playing mechanics that I really like.

I think roleplaying itself probably needs a better definition though. By role-playing i don't mean being a thespian but that the game centers, revolves around and rewards the specific goals and desires of the character.

In TSOY you get experience for involving yourself in your characters Keys (you use keys to buy skills, secrets, abilities etc.)

In Burning Wheel you get basically action points for doing things related to your characters goals and desires.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Please please please don't try to sell me a book on roleplaying. I know how to roleplay. I enjoy it. And, frankly, I've got everything I'll ever need for 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 8th edition roleplaying right between my ears.

THis is a completely shoddy and dare I say it, completely ill-considered argument for not including RP info/suggestions.

By that logic, D&D books need contain no information advice on creating/writing adventures, desiging settings, and so on - because you, an experienced RPer and DM, know how that all works.

What about the new guy?

You think it's cool to damn those new to D&D to a complete lack of what you consider to be common knowledge, which is to say, of how to roleplay? I daresay if D&D ignores RP completely in 4E, your average D&D player in ten-fifteen years is going to closely resemble your average Diablo 2 player from a few years ago - only interested in his "build" and how to upgrade it. Sure, people like you and me, experienced RPers, will be RPing and loving it, but unless the book explains to the newbs, the information is NOT going to magically appear in their brains.

I've made this argument a million times, though, and WotC know they can put that stuff in the PHB2 or DMG2 and shrug, because guess what, if D&D turned into a collectible minatures game which happened to need a lot of books to play right, which it just happened you could RP in? They'd probably be pulling several times as much profit.

It's just the complete failure to explain what role-playing is, or in any way support creating a character with a personality, backstory and so on that I object to, and to be real, it was 3E's problem, not 3.5E's. Hopefully 4E will do at least as much as 3.5E, in which case I won't be bothered.

Saying "I know how to do it already!" though, is really a bad reason for not teaching others.

 

[BryonD]

THis is a completely shoddy and dare I say it, completely ill-considered argument for not including RP info/suggestions.

By that logic, D&D books need contain no information advice on creating/writing adventures, desiging settings, and so on - because you, an experienced RPer and DM, know how that all works.

What about the new guy?

To the contrary, you have offered more of a completely shoddy and ill-considered response.

Creating and designing settings and adventures is not roleplaying.

I've learned a lot about creating and designing since I started playing. But RP is still the same RP as the day I was the new guy. Completely replacing what I said with something else doesn't change that.

Why don't we save each other a few minutes? I'll assume a cliche ruin explorer insult laden response and we can just both skip to the end.

 

[BryonD]

I understand your point completely and respect your opinion. But personally I do feel that the current direction of focusing almost solely on mechanics while including little that actually promotes RP does have a negative impact on that part of the game.

Unlike Changeling that has a predetermined setting, having a game (like D&D) that can be used for many different genres can make it difficult to incorprate RP elements into the core rules. But maybe they can be included in the setting material?

Putting it in a setting would be a much better idea than in the core.

I'd still suggest that RP is the part of an RPG that has unlimited freedom and someone who has never been at your table before is only going to put constraints on it. Yeah, they may encourage one specific thing with a mechanic. But in encouraging that one thing they discourage a hundred others.

I think the best way to handle RP reinforcement is through GM/player interaction and rewards such as XP, action points, or some completely different system can work there. And open-ended advice to GMs on how to manage more than just combat is a perfectly good use of DMG pages. But how to reward good RP is different than "how to RP". Completely different.

If the mechanics reward XYZ behavior then you will mostly get XYZ behavior. I think that restricts good role players and limits the development of poor role players.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To the contrary, you have offered more of a completely shoddy and ill-considered response.

Creating and designing settings and adventures is not roleplaying.

I've learned a lot about creating and designing since I started playing. But RP is still the same RP as the day I was the new guy. Completely replacing what I said with something else doesn't change that.

Why don't we save each other a few minutes? I'll assume a cliche ruin explorer insult laden response and we can just both skip to the end.

Let's not. So you knew everything you needed to know about RP and completely and totally understood the concept (including how to create a character with some depth, why that's fun and so on), from day one? Is that what you're saying?

 

[BryonD]

Shadow of Yesterday, Burning Wheel and Sorcerer actually has role-playing mechanics that I really like.

I think roleplaying itself probably needs a better definition though. By role-playing i don't mean being a thespian but that the game centers, revolves around and rewards the specific goals and desires of the character.

In TSOY you get experience for involving yourself in your characters Keys (you use keys to buy skills, secrets, abilities etc.)

In Burning Wheel you get basically action points for doing things related to your characters goals and desires.

I'm not up on these games in specific. (My days of all thing gaming are well in the past. ) But in general this sounds like the kind of open-ended GM/player type thing that I'd enjoy.

 

[GlassJaw]

You don't need rules for role-playing, but rules can encourage role-playing.

True, and many systems do that, but I don't really see that as being part of the core D&D rules. The core rules are pretty much black and white.

 

[Jhaelen]

You don't need rules for role-playing. Every group will incorporate as much or as little as deemed necessary.

Exactly. The 4th.ed. rules won't have any effect on roleplaying at all, if you don't want them to.

To the OP: There have been indications that there will be opportunities for roleplaying / social encounters. They'll even include a new set of rules for social encounters. Sounds pretty encouraging for me.

 

[Magus Coeruleus]

Ruin Explorer: I feel that your original response BryonD was worded unnecessarily harshly, to the point of being rather rude. That's a shame because I completely agree with your argument and don't want it to get lost in the issue of your tone. The bulk of people who care enough to participate in these forums have RPed a long time and don't need or want RP advice as much in those books, but we have to look to the future of the hobby. Those explanations and tips for RPing need to be there not for US but for future gamers. That said, this information should be made as concise and generic (as opposed to assuming a particular style of play) as possible. More of this info should go in the DMG than the PHB, but even the PHB needs some of this material, I believe.

MC