Stalker0 said:
I now point you to the pregen wizard from DDX, who has a largely overlooked ability:
MAGE HAND AT WILL!!!
If you read the power its actually quite powerful. Think of the roleplaying potential of being able to do lesser telekinesis whenever you want...at first level even!! In 3e, you throw a magic missile, maybe a color spray, and your spent. Now I can play a wizard that sits in a chair while my magic turns the pages for me. I can have a servant who I give a telekinetic smack if he messes up. My guests are served by floating dishes that arrive to the table.
This.
Wizards clearly have plenty of wizard-flavor going on, thanks to at-will cantrips. When I saw the wizard pregen sheet, I was ecstatic, not because of any of the blasty combat spells--blasty spells are boring and always have been--but because of the non-combat, minor utility magic that is finally usable at will, the way it should be.
As a wizard player since the days of Classic, most of my best moments have come from creative use of spells with no direct combat utility. I tend to scorn
fireball and the
lightning bolt in favor of spells like
major image (or
spectral force, in 2E terms) and
magic jar. Having free access to cantrip-type spells will be a godsend.
And we haven't even seen how ritual magic works yet...
Kishin said:
Roleplaying and storytelling are rule system independent activities.
Not entirely true. I have seen mechanics that actively foster roleplaying; for example, White Wolf's "Willpower" system, where you get in-game benefits (basically a primitive action-point mechanic) for acting in accordance with your character's motivations and personality. While the Willpower mechanic was easily abused, it did push people to think about who their characters were and what motivated them.
D&D has never had much in the way of mechanics to encourage roleplaying, though. The alignment system was a crude effort in that direction, but so ham-fistedly implemented that it hurt more than it helped; because your class often dictated your choice of alignment for you, people would pick an alignment and then design a persona around it, instead of inventing a persona and then picking the appropriate alignment.
Having said all that, I do sort of see the OP's point. 4E does have much more of a gamist "feel" than previous editions. I think it has to do with the company making it. WotC's roots lie in Magic: The Gathering, which is a game first and foremost and makes only token nods to simulating a pretend reality, and WotC carries over that gamist sensibility* into RPG design. 3E is a schizophrenic beast, mixing TSR's simulationism with WotC's gamism... often to the detriment of both, in my opinion. 4E, however, is truly WotC's game, and WotC has always laid heavy stress on the G part of RPG.
Still, I don't think 4E is going to be bad for the roleplaying side. I do have some beefs with what I feel to be excessive gamism, like the near-total abstraction of hit points. (If you get knocked into negative hit points, you have either taken a mortal wound which will cause you to bleed out and die, or suffered minor injuries which will cease to trouble you after 6 hours' rest. Which one is it? The answer remains indeterminate until you either fail your save to survive, or are stabilized, at which point the waveform collapses and the question is retroactively settled. You have Schrodinger's hit points.) But that's small potatoes compared to the massive streamlining of the system. In my opinion, roleplaying suffers much more from the endless number-crunching of 3E than it does from the occasional 4E corner case--the more time you spend processing numbers, the less time you spend getting into your character and exploring his/her personality.
*I use "sensibility" here to mean "worldview." I'm not trying to imply that WotC's approach is somehow more sensible than TSR's.
