NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5458630" data-attributes="member: 42582">Great post, can't posrep you again yet.I'm looking for people to stop trying to tell me that 4e is primarily a tactical skirmish game, or that a game run without a pre-build setting cannot be anything but a series of hack-n-slash random encounters not much different from a game like Talisman.Now someone might turn around and say that when a poster says "4e is just a skirmish game" what they're really saying is "4e is just a skirmish game for me", or "I can't see any way to run or play 4e other than as a skirmish game." But I don't buy it. In particular, the tone of "I can't see any way to run or play 4e other than as a skirmish game" is something like a confession of an inability, or of a desire to learn - it invites a response of "OK, fair enough, but here's how I do it, maybe you could try that if you were interested". But the tone of "4e is just a tactical skirmish game" isn't like that at all. It's pretty clearly an attack on the game, with an implied criticism of the players of the game as not being real roleplayers.And it irritates me, because I like to come here and participate in a forum where posters ranging from The Shaman and Lanefan and Raven Crowking to Hussar and LostSoul and others share ideas on how to run roleplaying games that use various techniques to produce various experiences. I want the sorts of discussions that led me to <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/299440-exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-sunday.html" target="_blank">try running a non-sandbox exploration scenario</a>. Or to think harder about how to run skill challenges, as has come up in this thread. And being told that I'm really just playing a tactical skirmish game and not an RPG gets in the way of these discussions I want to have, as well as really rubbing me up the wrong way.And for completeness: the lowpoint of those sorts of jibes is when roleplaying in 4e is compared to speaking in a funny voice while moving the boot around the monopoly board. Which example I have seen put forward, on multiple occasions, as a real contribution to the analysis of the nature of roleplaying in 4e. That sort of nonsense isn't just about someone not feeling like playing 4e, or not knowing how to run or to play in 4e, and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.</blockquote>

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