My samey experience comes from the top-down approach (I believe
@Imaro referred to it earlier more eloquently) where the requirement of a grid and the play of a power-"card" allows one to move along around the chessboard and where every other player is doing the same with the uniform AEDU and character sheets. So although the powers themselves may not be similar the play experience makes everything samey.
And then you add the language or slide/push - well that accentuates the samey experience for me since many a times they APPEAR similar on the board (not that they are technically the same). That is my samey experience with 4e. Nothing more nothing less.
Do any 4e proponents take issue with this description - and if so why?
though I liked the tactical play of 4e and found it rewarding, I also disliked how it seemed oriented towards grid and miniature play, but I would never use "samey" to describe this experience nor would I use it to describe the grid-play of chess. What I could see as a more pressing issue, from my perspective at least, would be whether this grid-based play was perceived as inorganic. If you dislike making these sort of tactical "moves" or find them psychologically unrewarding, then being asked to constantly engage them as a mechanic over and over again might accumulate to a repetitive feeling over time.
If that's how you,
@Sadras, played/experienced 4e then I take you at your word.
If you're suggesting that it's some sort of general description of the play of the game then I take issue.
(1) The game doesn't, as such, involve "playing cards". It involves declaring actions, drawing on player resources. It's clearly less card-like than playing an AD&D magic-user, because (1) you're not repeatedly building up a "hand" (unless your 4e PC is actually a wizard, in which case you have to make choices from a spellbook after each extended rest), and (2) when you declare actions your "hand" doesn't become uniformally depleted.
(2) There's no chess board. I've never used gridded maps or tokens in RPGing except when playing 4e, because I've never before (or since) played a RPG that called for them. The grid did not seem like a chess board to me, because it's not defined purely or even primarily by the relational properties of squares. It's defined primarily by the things and places depicted on it, with the squares purely as a measuring device.
Whereas I've never done grid combat before, I've certainly done my share of grid mapping (for dungeons) and hex mapping (for wildernesses) and those didn't feel like chess either.
(3)
every other player is doing the same with the uniform AEDU and character sheets. This seems to be the recurring theme of this thread, at least as I have read it. (And I'm now making my recurring post of this thread.) I don't get it at all. In RQ every character sheet is "the same", in the sense that it has stats, skills and spells. In RM every character sheet is "the same", in the sense that it has stats, skills and (maybe) spell lists. In Classic Traveller or Prince Valiant, every character sheet is "the same" in the sense that it has stats and skills. In Cthulhu Dark every character sheet is "the same" in the sense that it has a name, a job and an insanity die sitting on top of it.
For me, the play experience isn't the PC build. In Cthulhu Dark, the longshoreman and the law firm secretary didn't feel or play the same just because their PC sheets were structurally identical. In Traveller the jack-of-all-trades and the spy don't feel or play the same just because their PCs sheets are structurally identical. In our RM games all the PCs have always felt very different, although their PC sheets and resource suites are typically very similar (except some warrior types use "adrenal moves" in place of spells, which are closer to encounter-level recovery).
Frankly, if someone's play experience is defined by the feel of the PC sheet, the resource recovery process, and the grid system used to ration movement, that makes me wonder whether the fiction was pretty weak. Or whether the players were actualy delcaring actions that made a difference to it. It would also make me wonder whether they've ever played a RPG beyond D&D with its quirky never-the-twain-shall-resemble class-based PC building.
