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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5395498" data-attributes="member: 1300">I love 4th Ed, I love the battles and the fighting, and I think it's the most fun-to-play version of D&D yet, but I basically agree with you here.Here's the core problem, as I see it, and the one all of us who love 4E would like to ignore.If you give people a list of cool things to do, they will tend to want to do them.In other words, in AD&D, your basic dude has...extremely few options listed on his character sheet. In D&D4, your dude has a whole boatload of things he can do, Powers and Skills, all listed right there. And the Powers are *really cool*.So I feel we're all being somewhat disingenuous when we say "Oh it's just as much about roleplaying as ever."Well, maybe it's not. If you give people a stack of cards with cool powers on them, they're going to spend their time looking at them, figuring them out, imagining how cool they'll be to use, and eagerly waiting for a chance to use them.If you don't give people anything, they'll pay attention to everything else. The world, the details, their character, his goals and personality. They'll be inventive, frightened, courageous.So yeah, I've thought about switch back to AD&D, never really played basic, or using some other mechanism to get players to put down the powers and think. But for the moment, my feeling is; it's just intertia that must be overcome. You just have to get your players into the habit of roleplaying and they'll do it.Present them problems that can't be solved by fighting. That's probably the biggest thing. If you're not putting situations, preferably involving people (people are more interesting than things) that can't be solved by fighting, then your players will default to using their powers. So give them situations involving people in conflict with each other, the party, and themselves. Situations that can't be solved with their powers. Revel in ambiguity. Rarely should there be obviously correct things to do. Faulkner said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. Put that in your game. Don't let the players off the hook with easy solutions, put conflicts in front of them where it seems like everyone's right and everyone's in conflict.Even in the dungeon, the only difference between 4E and Basic is that 4E gives you a skill to remove ambiguity about jumping a chasm...for a given sized chasm. So put the ambiguity *back in*. Give them something to navigate that couldn't possibly be jumped, and now 4E will be like Basic. They'll be back to problem solving, rather than die rolling.</blockquote>

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