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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4499409" data-attributes="member: 42582">Actually he says that the roleplaying one gets with 3E is objectively more sophisticated than the roleplaying one gets from 4e. Which is a different, more contentious and more pejorative claim.Saying you can roleplay in Monopoly is like saying you can roleplay in solitaire or you can roleplay in golf (the club is my sword, the ball is my foe's head . . . or something). It's a nonsense claim that sheds no light on the relationship between mechanics and roleplaying.Unlike Monopoly, solitaire or golf the 4e rulebooks are chockfull of mechanics to support a roleplaying game.From the perspective of RPGing, 4e in no very interesting way resembles chess, checkers, backgammon, ludo or any other boardgame which revolves around the movement of pieces on a board with the aim including the capture of another player's pieces. (Classic Traveller has rules for starship movement that (i) involves measurement of movement in more-or-less arbitrary numerical intervals, and (ii) cannot reasonably be applied in an episode of starship combat without the use of some sort of visual representation. Has anyone ever suggested that Traveller is really therefore a boardgame resembling chess?)In many interesting ways 4e resembles such RPGs as HeroWars/Quest or The Riddle of Steel. In many interesting ways it differs from such RPGs as Rolemaster, Runequest or 3E D&D. These are the meanignful comparitors for any discussion of the implications, for roleplaying, of the 4e mechanics.Lost Soul's point is that there is a certain approach to roleplaying - one which focuses on the use of game rules to resolve conflicts that emerge between elements of (frequently, but not always, characters in) a fictional world - and that 4e has more such rules than any earlier edition of D&D.Now, unless someone is going to either (i) show that this is not so, or else (ii) show that this is a flawed conception of roleplaying, then the claim that 4e is inadequate as a roleplaying vehicle (and the hint that it is as much an RPG as is chess or Monopoly) has been refuted for at least some conceptions of roleplaying.What's insulting is the imputation that a certain sort of roleplaying is less sophisticated than BryonD's preferred approach to roleplaying, which imputation is compounded by discussions of roleplaying in 4e that compare it to non-roleplaying games such as chess or Monopoly rather than to the RPGs that obviously (and per the testimony of the designers actually) inspired 4e's design.To put it bluntly: anyone who is remotely familiar with Lost Soul's posting history has no credible basis for suggesting that s/he is not a sophisticated roleplayer who is eminently capable of judging whether or not 4e offers good support for the sort of roleplaying s/he is interested in.It's obvious that some RPGers do not like the sort of highly self-conscious, metagame-heavy approach to roleplaying that is part-and-parcel of a game like 4e. And it's obvious that, for those players, 4e will not do it for them. But I don't see that those players therefore have licence to say that the sort of play 4e supports is not (real, complex, sophisticated) roleplaying.</blockquote>

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