Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SabreCat" data-source="post: 5609740" data-attributes="member: 76245">Yeah, the lack of a turn structure was definitely part of it. It was fun while the characters were all attending a grand dance, each up to their own thing. (My Rogue got engaged to a prince!) It started to bog when the Paladin went to talk to some three or four different NPCs in succession seeking advice on a moral quandary she faced, and any meaningful commentary the rest of us offered ran into the "hey, you aren't there" problem.In a more general sense, the trouble I have with noncombat D&D--especially noncombat, non-skill-challenge D&D--is that it's slippery. By slippery, I mean the opposite of "crunchy" or rules-heavy, with a negative connotation to it. Unless you're performing a ritual or have some unusually specific out-of-combat feats and features (things like the Knight Hospitaler theme features perhaps), there's little way to know what the consequences of success or failure on a roll are. You can't look to your character sheet to figure out what you can and can't do, what options you have."But that's the point! You have to improvise and be creative!" Sure. Thing is, the success or failure of that improvisation and creativity lie entirely in the DM's court. You can announce the intent of a die roll, but the DM isn't obligated to make that intent come through. And sometimes she isn't even equipped to do so--during the aforementioned session, several players wanted to research the location they'd been tasked to delve, so History rolls started. A 25 (we're 19th level) got a nice little blurb about the legends surrounding the place. A 26 earned the same thing. It wasn't until the third or fourth player tried their roll and got a 41 with pretty much the same result that we learned, oh, the DM doesn't have any more information on the place than that. A game with a more robust knowledge-check system would have let the player add some facts to the world, with an extraordinary roll like that!And at the end of the day (game session?), that's what it comes down to, for me. D&D4 is really good at and designed for heroic or superheroic, tactical, board-gamey battle scenes. They're enormous fun from one session and encounter to the next. But for things that don't involve greatswords and fireballs, there's not much structure to hang the "G" part of "RPG" on. I kitbash some more interesting mechanics into the plot- and setting-focused segments of my own campaign, but I know that if I really want a game to shine in those arenas, I pick a different game. Burning Wheel, some flavor of FATE, In a Wicked Age, etc. Play to your game's strengths, I say!</blockquote>

Verification