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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5614501" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, I don't think I buy this. There's plenty of 'fluff' attached to classes and races in the PHBs. There are also quite a few other RP hooks. More than in past editions from what I can see. People may get distracted by the shiny combat game and NOT RP, but I don't think the presentation of 4e discourages it at all. I think there are a few factors that have converged to create the 'people don't RP in 4e' trope. At some level WotC did it, but I think the story is not very straightforward.1) They made a decision not to build a lot of adventures and in-depth settings. The system, particularly early on, was very heavy on crunch books. The adventures they did make were railroady hack-fests. None of this really helped.2) Combat is always long and involved. I'm not sure I like the term 'too long', but it sucks up time and if you have players that like to fight you do quickly run out of time to get them RPing much. There are answers to this however, the DMG simply should have said more about it (I'd say they didn't understand the issue at that time though).3) The encyclopedic rule system tends to discourage a lot of tinkering, or more importantly a lot of experimentation with story related game elements. An example would be cursed items. Usually they're problematic, so they aren't discussed in the rules, yet they are a perfectly viable tool to use. Most DMs simply avoid them because there is almost nothing 'official' on the subject.There are a few other things in the same vein, but I'd also say that IME 4e allows for some exceptionally rich RP opportunities as the PCs have a hard time falling back on 'fixer magic' to deal with plot issues and such. Rituals, diseases (curses fall here), a good solid non-combat XP system, and the fact that the party will generally cover most non-combat capabilities pretty well actually makes doing this stuff quite easy and rewarding. The genuine ease of building good monsters and opponents helps a LOT too. Being let loose from the old "well, lets see what magic user spell we can pound into this round hole" is good. Rituals again are a great boon here as they have no impact on opponent's combat capability (in general) but provide nice plot devices. Unlike AD&D where monsters were really SO different from PCs that it was hard to apply PC mechanics to them in 4e they have all the sorts of hooks that PCs do, so it is actually quite easy to borrow PC mechanics of almost any sort for them as well.Yeah, I understand what you mean. There were certain characteristics of the way that worked. One was that generally a stat between say 8 and 14 didn't really matter. It COULD matter for ability checks, but IME those were actually used pretty rarely (but I'm sure that isn't everone's experience). One result was a character that was 'blessed' with all mediocre stats was pretty blah and they all tended to blur together after a while as 'Joe Anycharacter'. So in a sense I kind of like the fact that a 14 is materially better than a 12. OTOH the range from +1 to +4 is a pretty significant difference in to-hit (less so for skills, but it certainly matters there too). Add in the fact that characters ramp right on up to +8 or +9 at high epic and I agree that stat bonuses are a little steep. I'd ditch stat boosts myself, which would help.</blockquote>

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