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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4077965" data-attributes="member: 4937">"The rules for 4e combat are too abstract. If I take them literally, then it leads to silly conclusions about the rules and physics of the gameworld."That's mostly it, but the problem isn't that they are too abstract.  D&D has always been abstract about things like hit locations and injuries.  The problem is that they are not intended to have any level of 'casual realism'.  Take the 'Cohen the Barbarian' problem.  To a certain extent, the game has always had this problem, and 'Cohen' I think owes something in his conception to D&D.  But with intelligence providing Reflex/AC, charisma providing Will, and presumably something like wisdom providing Fortitude the upshot of these rules is that any NPC that acquires attributes also acquires some unwanted attributes.  Feeble accountants, aged octogenerians, and little old ladies suddenly are as strong of combatants in thier infirmity as they were in thier youth.  This strongly discourages me from treating non-combatant NPC's as even having attributes.  Certainly I can't have them following any sort of consistant rules.And there are dozens and dozens of problems like that.  I just don't feel inclined to work out how the implied game world actually works.  It is a silly world.  I don't feel inclined to make house rules in it.  I don't feel inclined to think about how the different parts of the world interact.  Why do I not feel inclined to do any of these things?  Because quite obviously the designers didn't feel so inclined either.  What I saw as the hinderances to role play in D&D weren't even on the list of designer's concerns.   I'm not going to dig back through that list, because I made it several times back when 4E was first announced.  I'm not going to try to talk anyone out of liking 4E.  Just take my word for it that 4E feels fundamentally different to me than previous editions, and to the extent that it does feel like previous editions it is highlighting the system integrity problems that drove me from D&D initially back in the mid-90's.  Perhaps it would explain something to say that I think the use of minatures at all detracts from the role-playing experience.  I didn't use minatures at all until 3rd edition.  The problem with minatures is that they tend to provide an external reference for the imagination, so that you are continually distracted from imagining the described events happen to you, and instead spend your time imagining the described events happening to the minature on the table.  I consider this a less satisfying role-playing experience than experiencing events in 'first person'.</blockquote>

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