NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5724938" data-attributes="member: 6673496">I'm not Bryon. And I would tend to categorize 4th Edition as being "too much boardgame in an RPG" rather than trying to claim that it's not a roleplaying game.But for me it really does boil down to associated and dissociated mechanics: When you're using mechanics which are associated with the game world and with your character, your mechanical decisions -- the act of actually playing the game -- is roleplaying.OTOH, when you're using mechanics which are dissociated from the game world, your mechanical decisions -- the act of playing the game -- isn't roleplaying.This is, IMO, the essential, defining feature of a "roleplaying game". If the mechanics of a game aren't roleplaying, then it's not a roleplaying game.With that being said, you can still roleplay in the vicinity of non-roleplaying mechanics. And lots of people clearly have fun doing that. But you can also do that with lots of other non-roleplaying games -- Arkham Horror, Clue, whatever.For me, unfortunately, the particular mix of roleplaying and non-roleplaying mechanics in D&D4 is simply not palatable. I have the continual sensation of getting into character only to have the dissociated mechanics yank me out of it again. I'm not certain if this is specific to D&D (which I expect to be a roleplaying game), specific to this particular mixture, or general to any such mixing.(I suspect it's the second: I don't mind light roleplaying mechanics injected into other game forms. And I'm generally a fan of story games which feature lots of dissociated, narrative control mechanics. I think it's the sheer pointlessness of 4th Edition's dissociated mechanics that turns my taste against it so thoroughly.For an example that I ran into over the weekend: In Gamma World the Alien origin features three powers: One of these allows you to call your spaceship to teleport you; but oddly this teleport can only move you 10 squares. Another explicitly allows you to command your mothership to translocate a mini-nuke... as long as it translocates within 20 squares of you. It's not just that I can't take these powers seriously; it's that there's a complete disconnect between the mechanics and what the mechanics are supposedly modeling.)Long story short: When people talk about how "shallow" they find 4E or that it reminds them of a video game, I think they're generally struggling to figure out why large chunks of the system simply don't play like a roleplaying game. (And this is because large chunks of the system isn't.)It's long been held that roleplaying is something that happens outside of the mechanics of the game. That whole "roleplayer vs. rollplayer" thing. But that's not actually true. The gameplay of roleplaying games has always featured mechanical decisions which are simultaneously character decisions: The act of making the mechanical decision is an act of roleplaying.4E moved away from that. And it's one of the major problems people have with it.</blockquote>

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