hardly anybody reads guidelines, and those who read them seldom remember them.
<snip>
if the easiest way to do combat requires imagining a fictional reality, players will do that instead.
One can, of course, overcome this tendency; either by a sustained effort (usually on the part of the DM), or by having players so accustomed to a different style of play that they bring those habits into 4E. But in the absence of either of these, I think board-gamey play is the most likely outcome.
The guidelines I had in mind were mostly those for the GM relating to encounter design.
If the GM designs encounters in accordance with the guidelines in the DMG and DMG2 (or the amalgam of them found in the newer DM's Kit book), then I think that doing combat
will require imagining a fictional reality - rooms, walls, trees, pits, ponds, etc, around and within which the combat takes place.
But I think those guidelines would be enhanced by helping to explain to the GM
what they are for. At the moment the books talk rather generically about more "interesting" or "dynamic" combats, but don't talk about the contribution that encounter building in accordance with those guidelines will make to construction of and engagement with the shared imaginary space. (I think this is important - we're not just talking here about the players using their imaginations or talking in funny voices - we're talking about (or, at least, I'm talking about) the players engaging the fiction as part of action resolution).)
What the guidelines to GM's don't include is advice on how to build
conflicts in encounters that will also encourage that sort of engagement (eg how to choose monsters, plots etc that are relevant to particular PC races, classes, paragon paths, typical backstories etc).
And published adventures tend to undermine the force of the terrain/location guidelines, by not following the advice and producing fairly static encounter areas where the fiction doesn't matter all that much; and they tend to compound the lack of advice on conflict building by having banal hooks, banal plots and a general orientation in favour of railroading.
When it comes to skill challenges the published adventures on the whole are just as bad, and the published guidelines are equally bad - while there are exhortations to the GM to make the fiction matter in action resolution, there is no concrete advice on how to actually do this. (Which is dissapointing, given the other published examples on which the WotC writers could have drawn for inspiration.)
To an extent, then, I agree with you about a need for effort on the part of the GM - but it is not so much effort at the point of action resolution, as opposed to effort at the point of encounter design - to build encounters that will, in their resolution,
make the fiction salient to the players. Because once this has been done, the players will engage with it because this is part of what has to be done to play the game.
The converse is equally true -
given that it is in relation to terrain and location, as well as to the thematic/plot significance of a conflict, that 4e makes the fiction relevant (and not at the level of facing, body shape, handedness etc), then if encounters are set up and resolved in complete indifference to these matters, the fiction will naturally tend to drop away, as a mere epiphenomenon.
RP is independent of rules. Completely. You can RP with no rules. You can RP while playing Monopoly.
I think that you're talking here about funny voice, first person descriptions of character actions, etc. But this is not roleplaying in the sense that (at least some of us) are debating here.
When P1NBACK, LostSoul and I (and I think also Dausuul and perhaps also RC) talk about roleplaying we're talking about
engaging the fiction being relevant to action resolution. In Monopoly this is not true. In Magic: the Gathering this is not true. In these games the fiction is a mere ephiphenomenon. No doubt Magic or Monopoly would be more boring without the flavour text, but the flavour text does not contribute to the mechanical play of the game.*
In an RPG, the fiction should not be a mere epiphenomenon. I think that it is not in 4e, when encounters are built and resolved according to the design specifications. But my view on this (and experience that supports it) is not universal.
*Footnote: it is sometimes suggested that, because flavour text in 4e is not rigid across situations, it is irrelevant to resolution. I don't agree with this. For example, just because "prone" or "sneak attack" can mean different things in relation to a golem, an ooze, a snake etc, it doesn't mean that it's particular meaning on any given occasion of use is merely epiphenomenal. It establishes a particular fictional state of affairs which may be salient to action resolution. While in the case of prone, 4e generally tends not to care about body shape or facing, it could still make a difference - if a humanoid drops prone, for example, it will generally be harder to see any markings on its front, whereas if a snake has been knocked prone (= being flipped onto its back) then it will generally be easier to see the markings on its front. This is fiction as something other than epiphenomenon.
My contention is that RP is in the details of the character's actual actions.
The issue for me is - at what level of detail? And what am I expected to do with that detail?
Like I posted upthread, I'm just not that interested in issues of facing, body shape, handedness, do I swing high or low?, etc. And even if my players told me, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
The part of the PC's actions that I do care about, and that I do know what to do with and how to respond to, are their motivations, their goals, and (in 4e) the way they move about on the battlefield to accomplish these things.
The first big paragon fight in my game has involved defending a village against an assault by a squad of hobgoblin soldiers riding a behemoth, plus a squad of bugbear assassins, plus a handful of devil-worshipping casters accompanied by an imp.
Two of the PCs are good with animals - the ranger-cleric and the wizard. The first thing they thought of when the say the behemoth was knocking of its hobgoblin controller and taking it over. After a couple of rounds the controller was dead and the ranger climbed onto the behemoth (with a successful Acrobatics check to get up on top of it) and proceeded to take control of it (with a successful Nature check). At the end of the combat, when one of the spellcasters was running away, the dwarven fighter joined the ranger to head off on a dinosaur-mounted tracking expedition, as the players discussed whether their should keep the behemoth (and if so, how exactly?), or let it go into the wild, or kill it (and if so, again, how exactly?).
Another thing that happened during the fight was that the drow sorcerer, who was on his own on top of a roof (having flown up there using Winds of Change) was attacked by the invisible imp - who turned out to be Twitch, an imp the PCs had met before and very tentatively bargained with - he had been offering to teach the sorcerer the art of mastering the chaos, but the wizard PC intervened (on general anti-diabolic-bargaining grounds) and drove the imp off. Twitch taunted the sorcerer about his continuing failure to master the chaos, and seemed to have the upper hand in the rooftop duel until the paladin intervened with a Ray of Reprisal, hurting Twitch badly and saving the sorcerer from a lot of damage. Twitch then tried to bargain in turn with the sorcerer - offering to tell him the secret of the mystic rune emblazoned on the inside of his eyelids if the sorcerer would spare him - but the sorcerer refused to bargain. Twitch nevertheless managed to turn invislbe and escape - he had only 5 hp left, but the ranger (the only one who could notice the invisible Twitch) had other more pressing foes to engage.
Another thing that happened was that the dwarf fighter (a polearm melee controller type), who had been locking down a good chunk of the hobgoblins as well as two spellcasters, got stunned by the hobgoblin captain and then knocked unconscious by the attacks of the other enemies surrounding him before he could use any of his many healing resources. At that point things were looking bad for the party. The ranger-cleric couldn't get close enough while staying on his behemoth (and didn't want to let it loose and have to mix it up in melee). But the wizard suggested to the teifling paladin that there was a clear path for him to get to the fighter, if he was able to bust through the wall of one of the houses, which surely was weakened by now after having been burning for a number of rounds. The paladin charged, broke through the wall (but suffered quite a bit of damage as bits of building fell down on him) and had a minor action left to use Lay on Hands - thus reviving the fighter and thereby saving the day.
In my view, what I've just described is roleplaying and not just a boardgame. Various sorts of fictional positioning was at work in all those events. In various ways, it has affected the action resolution, both mechanically (eg taking control of the behemoth, a teifling charging through a burning building) and fiction-to-fiction (eg the re-encounter with Twitch and Twitch's narrow escape).
And to achieve this, I (and my group) didn't have to push against 4e's rules. All I did, as GM, was to follow the encounter building guidelines that the rules provide,
plus consider seriously the thematic/plot aspect of conflict design. And given that I'd done that, all my players had to do was to play their characters.
In my view, the fact that facing/position/body shape (other than the behemoth's Huge size) didn't come into it didn't impede the roleplaying, because that is not all that counts when considering and responding to a character's actual actions.
