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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Red Castle" data-source="post: 8955363" data-attributes="member: 7040765">I don't think it would have change much. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide released just 2 months after the release of the core books and it didn't stop them from thinking that 4e didn't support roleplay and was focused on combat.I think it has more to do with the presentation and organisation of the Player handbook than anything. If you just look through the PHB, it's true that it really reads like a rulebook with just rules and very little in terms of immersion. And then if you start to read the rules and classes, the section on combat rules is much longer than the part on skills (30 vs 15) and that every class description is 14 pages of pretty much combat only powers. Then, except for the rituals, the spells has a lot less description than in other editions.But it basically come from a misconception that lore equal roleplay. The idea that the more lore there is, the more roleplay you can get. Which is not true. It's two totally different thing. You could play in a world with a rich lore like Star Wars and just do spaceship combat after spaceship combat and there would be no roleplay, regardless of the lore of the game. Just like you could play a game with no lore at all and just talk in character and react to what the storyteller tells you and that would just be roleplay without any lore given by the system.And that's where 4e is different than other editions. The system doesn't tell the players what exactly happens, it ask the players, within some boundaries, what happens. It encourage creativity. It's not a game full of lore that you can learn about and be a scholar about its ecosystem, divinities or different kind of magic. It tells the players to make it their own, to decide how exactly the creatures behave or the Gods interact with mortals. This is your game, your table, so make it what you want it to be instead of relying on books telling you how it is. If you want lore, buy the campaign books from the premade world like Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun.The other misconception is that you need a lot of rules to roleplay. What is roleplay actually? Is it just not to take the role of a character for a time, act as if you you were someone else? What rules do you really need for that? You don't need rules to pretend to sit in a tavern with your fellow adventurer and talk with the locals. You don't need rules to explore a city or sits with the king preparing a defense plan against the horde of undead coming your way. You only need a way to resolve the occasional conflicts, and just a couple of skills and attribute will do, you don't need to have 40 skills. So it's only natural that a player handbook won't have a lot of rules for roleplay, because it doesn't need to.Now regarding combats, it's different.Since it's a direct conflict between the players and the storyteller, you need solid rules, or the players will feel cheated and there will be a lot of arguing about what you can and cannot do. It's the part that reminds the most the players that it is a game. You can spend an entire session doing just roleplay and not throw any dice, you can't in a combat. There will be lot of dice thrown. And since it's the action part of your movie, you don't want it to be boring, you don't want it to be just two group standing in the middle of a battlemap just attacking and doing damage. So what you do is create a system that encourage movement and gives a lot of action options to players and monsters, this way the combat will be dynamic. But the more option you give, the more space it takes in a player handbook. So instead of being 3-4 pages of text, the classes become 14 pages of different powers that you gain by leveling up.So, when looking through the player handbook, the first impression you'll get is that it has a lot more pages about combat than roleplay. But does it means that the game focus more on combat and neglect roleplay? Absolutely not, but you need to play it to find out. So it was easy for some to convince people that never played it that 4e was just about combat, just look through the player handbook and you'll see! And now it became common knowledge, when you talk about 4e, a lot person that never try it will believe that the edition focus only on combat, because that's what they've been told and looking through the books will support it. I'm currently running a 4e campaign with players that never tried it exactly to show them what the edition is really about, and so far they are loving it, they don't think it focus only on combat or that combats are too long. But they're a little bit shaken when I ask them what they think happen or let them help me create the lore, because they're not used to that in DnD.</blockquote>

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