Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5566059" data-attributes="member: 27160">Sure, but why is this badwrongfun?  My experience is that you are typically also thinking for and about your character in their current situation, so it's still roleplaying - just a specific and "gamist" style of roleplaying.I don't recognise the lack of situational importance in the play of 4E.  My experience is that players are still thinking very much about the terrain and situation surrounding their characters as they play.  They may be doing so in a more "game system" way than a "world physics (as I see it)" way, but that is a style issue, to me, not a right way/wrong way issue.Maybe that is so for you, but flanks, sight lines, terrain effects and the inbuilt interactions between character abilities seem to keep me and those I play with just as engaged as our individual characters' abilities.Yes, I recognise this difference, too, but I think we need to be very careful to think about what is really going on, here.  "The fiction" does not actually have any independent existence.  It resides in our imaginations - often there is assumed to be a "master copy" residing in one person's imagination.  Imagining things that have no independent existence is commonly called "making stuff up".  So, actually, the 'system' in use in these games is actually "we make stuff up".  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that - I love it as a game style, as one among several - but it can lead us astray in our thinking if we forget that this is what we are doing and ascribe the adjudications to any external "reality".Often there are strong guidelines that shape the "making stuff up".  A particular world concept, personal aesthetic sense ("taste") and personal beliefs about how the "real" world works are common influences.  But to assert that "the fiction" itself dictates anything to us, as an independent entity, is in my view both erroneous and dangerous.Actually, to begin with, I don't think that was how D&D was originally intended to focus.  Both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were wargamers, and initially that was how they viewed the game.  Pretty soon, people did start focussing on how combat (particularly) "should" work - and building a fiction ("making stuff up") to suit their own tastes and beliefs.  It was really this train of development that led me away from D&D in around 1980, because I was convinced at the time that "realism" was essential and D&D didn't have it.  What I see now is that what "realism" really meant was that D&D didn't fit with my personal beliefs about how the world worked; it was when those beliefs were gradually challenged and had to be changed that I realised that the "realism" my 20-odd year old self found was actually not significantly more "realistic" than D&D...Don't get me wrong - there is definitely a place for collaborative world building according to a group's aesthetic preferences, demands for consistency and beliefs about existence.  I have been a fan of the Hârn setting (and system) since around 1983 or 4, and that is a place I still constantly revisit to dream of an alien world I can almost touch.  But D&D doesn't do that for me - never has.  If it does for you, then I understand your annoyance with 4E - it must feel like an intruder on sacred land peddling profane and over-boistrous 'fun'.  But, we are at an impasse - because that boistrous fun is just what I like about 4E D&D, and it has not been generated half so well anywhere else.Different strokes, I think.  To me, the system description plus a little 'fluff' is what is happening in the game-world.  I don't need much of a sense that it is "realistic", nowadays, so it's just an "alien" world that works differently.  If you haven't seen the webcomic "<a href="http://www.erfworld.com/book-1-archive/?px=%2F001.jpg" target="_blank">Erfworld</a>", that is a graphic story that deals with just this concept really well.  It's also very funny... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Tabletop RPGs excel at a lot of things, in my experience.  Sadly, not all of them can be done at once, or with one mode of play.  That doesn't make any of them "wrong" or "suboptimal" - it just means that roleplaying is a broad and complex medium, like music or visual arts.  You can't improve Mozart by adding a driving beat and you won't get a better rock anthem by performing it with an orchestra in six variations.  Both forms are fine as they stand - mixing them to get "the ultimate piece of music" won't ever work.Yes* - you get a playstyle that you don't care for.  Fair enough.  But that doesn't make that style invalid or wrong.* I'm deliberately ignoring that this exclusive focus does not accurately fit any session of roleplaying I have ever been involved in, here - I understand it as exaggeration to make a point.</blockquote>

Verification