I doubt that the OP's experience is as rare as people might thing. I'd never have opened a new thread to discuss my own negative 4e experience on ENWorld myself and I'm frankly hesitant to even post about it now.
My experiences with 4e are pretty similar. The only difference is that the same effect occurs whether the players are interested in 4e or not. Any time I play with a group that has high expectations toward roleplay, the game ends with disappointment. The key cause for this is that the game does have an aspect where everything is geared toward combat and dice rolling. The new skill encounter rules as well seem geared much more toward roll and fail/ succeed than roleplay. There's definitely a sense of fight, pause, fight, pause in every 4e session I've been in. Generally that leads to my groups concluding that they can see how this appeals to people, but it doesn't appeal to them.
The Warcraft allusion comes up a lot.
Whether this will be changed when everyone has the books in their hands is yet to be seen, but in my rather large circle of gamers, no one would call them a 4e supporter thus far.
My experiences with 4e are pretty similar. The only difference is that the same effect occurs whether the players are interested in 4e or not. Any time I play with a group that has high expectations toward roleplay, the game ends with disappointment. The key cause for this is that the game does have an aspect where everything is geared toward combat and dice rolling. The new skill encounter rules as well seem geared much more toward roll and fail/ succeed than roleplay. There's definitely a sense of fight, pause, fight, pause in every 4e session I've been in. Generally that leads to my groups concluding that they can see how this appeals to people, but it doesn't appeal to them.
The Warcraft allusion comes up a lot.
Whether this will be changed when everyone has the books in their hands is yet to be seen, but in my rather large circle of gamers, no one would call them a 4e supporter thus far.
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