Tactical Boardgame?

[hong]

I noticed I was roleplaying the last time I played Monopoly. In terms of stuff I was saying at the table, not in terms of game decision making.

As a famous person once said, "Pong is a roleplaying game. You roleplay a ping pong paddle. The Squaresoft version of this is a blue-haired ping pong paddle."

 

[WheresMyD20]

I play in two groups in which the DMs do not use minis or grids for combat. When I DM, I save the battle mat for major encounters, and even then, the focus is less on the board and more on the game itself.

I've seen nothing in 4E that will force me to change my DMing ways. Flanking still works the same way, "Shifting" still works the same, and so on.

When we play 3e, my group plays the same way. We've found it to be a bit of a hassle at times, but doable. I hope you're right that 4e will still be playable this way. I'm afraid that new things like the eladrin's teleport, pushing powers, etc. will make this style of play even more difficult than it was under 3e.

 

[WheresMyD20]

This is why I have trouble taking the "4e has turned D&D into a tactical boardgame" argument seriously. Every element that requires a battle mat is already present in 3e. Now, if people were saying "3e turned D&D into a tactical boardgame", I'd have to at least partially agree. In the groups I play in, we never used miniatures before we started playing 3e.

Same here. Never used minis before 3e. When 4e was announced and one of the primary goals was streamlining and speeding up the game, I dared to hope that they'd ditch the minis and grid based combat. I was very disappointed to read in Races & Classes that keeping the grid was one of the design tenants and they never even considered removing it.

If there are any publishers listening, I'd love to see a good set of rules/guidelines for playing 4e without the grid.

 

[nightspaladin]

I've been sitting here at work thinking about how someone could assume based on the very little we have actually seen of real 4e game play how it is nothing but a tactical boardgame, when I decided to pull out the first adventure of Savage Tide AP to look at what I consider a very fun 1st level adventure. Having looked at it, I can't see anywhere where this type of game, or more specificly that very adventure couldn't be run in 4e. The combats are tactical. All the RP are RP. Nothing in that well written 3.5e adventure that seems at odds with what we have seen in 4e. All the cool mystery solving and surprises in a 4e version of that module would be exactly in the same place they were in the 3.5e version, namely in the RP portion of the game.

My point of this ramble is, that if a very nice 3.5e module, one that I considered amazingly fun to play in, could at a glance be still viable in 4e, I can't see how this game has changed much from the RPG we love. Only the mechanics have changed, not the ability to weave story around those tactical events.

 

[BryonD]

"Tactical board game" is just the new version of "videogamey" or "anime" or whatever. At least it's new.

Darn, you are on to us. I guess we have to admit now that 4E is perfect and has no flaws. We have been trying to label it with one or three word labels that make it sound bad because, well to be honest, we just hate young people. Young people might like this game and anything that brings pleasure to young people is, frankly, repugnant. It would really be nice if WotC hadn't designed such a masterpiece and we had real complaints to offer. But we have to play the hand we have been dealt. I may as well admit that all those detailed posts explaining our positions are not real. We have been using voodoo to make it appear that other text is there, but it really just says "tactical board game tactical board game tactical board game tactical board game". If we actually had something else to say we would.

"this playstyle isn't mine therefore it sucks"

Well duh, right? I mean I certainly wish that was a strawman arguement and was just an attempt to brush aside a bunch of legitimate concerns and reasons. But, alas, our true agenda of destroying all things in the world we don't personally embrace has been exposed. And don't think we are stopping with 4e. No no. Once we are done here curling is toast. And then we will really go on the attack.

 

[BryonD]

This is why I have trouble taking the "4e has turned D&D into a tactical boardgame" argument seriously. Every element that requires a battle mat is already present in 3e. Now, if people were saying "3e turned D&D into a tactical boardgame", I'd have to at least partially agree. In the groups I play in, we never used miniatures before we started playing 3e.

It isn't a question of what is in 4e that was in 3e already. It is a question of what has 4e removed. I'm not going to go through the list of issues over again. But as an example, pro-4e people have been celebrating that the new monster stat blocks include nothing but bare bones battle stats. Anything that didn't contibute directly to battle on the grid got whacked.

It isn't a boolean issue with 3e being not a tactical board game and 4e being a tactical board game. It is very fair to describe much of 3e as a tactical board game. I want to play an RPG that includes very significant elements of tactical board game in its combat system. But I also want to keep the other non-tactical elements that 4e has seen fit to remove. The 4e blend appears to be far to rich.

 

[RigaMortus2]

Well, my question is this... Why two seperate games? Why not just have D&D Mini's and then, if you want, insert roleplaying into it. The only addition you would need is a system to allow players to create their own characters (ie minis), which is basically what we are getting.

 

[Harkun]

D&D combat has always been boardgame-y. It has its roots in it

No, actually it hasn't and that is the point. Mr. Gygax (who we are now at a loss without him) and Mr. Arenson took the game AWAY from the board and allowed combat to be played in the head of a group of people around a table with a GM and his words describing the situation. Use of tabletop minis was always optional and frankly until 3.5 I never used them for anything but marching order. Thats about 20 some years of playing D+D without a mini or a tabletop map and combat went just fine.

Little by little however we have for some reason reversed what Gygax and Arenson did now it seems it's a total reversal, soon we will just be playing the D+D minis rules.

To the OP the problem was not the delve or the way D+D experience presented the rules. The fact is that the companies that are jumping ship and calling it "Tactical Combat" have not only seen the DD Exp but they have also paid for and seen the new SRD and decided to pass. When companies and people who have seen your rules decided to take a pass, you know you have a problem.

 

[sidonunspa]

.... Henry Lopez from Living Arcanis

Umm that would be Henry Lopez from Paradigm Concepts...

Paradigm Concepts publishes Arcanis: The World of Shattered Empires & WitchHunter: The Invisible World as well as some spycraft products.



But what I have seen, I have to agree... it feels like a board game (movement in squares and so on)

Reminds me of Hero's Quest I played back in the day.

Now 4e has some very cool ideas, just wish it was presented in more of a RPG is all..

 

[Mephistopheles]

The fact is that the companies that are jumping ship and calling it "Tactical Combat" have not only seen the DD Exp but they have also paid for and seen the new SRD and decided to pass.

I'm not sure what you mean by SRD.

I had up until recently assumed the major publishers at least would have had their hands on the rules during playtesting (with the requisite NDAs and so on). Chris Pramas's recent blog said that wasn't so, though.

As far as I'm aware WotC still don't have the GSL out to publishers.

I think at this point publishers know about as much (or as little, if you like) about 4E as the rest of us. I think I'd be getting pretty frustrated if I was trying to make business plans relating to a new product and still had no solid information about it or what sort of products I'd be allowed to produce for it 3 months out from its release.