Examples would be great for the overall discussion, even if anecdotal evidence.
I have an actual-play report posted
here. It describes both prep and play for an exploration-based 4e scenario. As far as I'm concerned, my experience in that session
utterly disproves any contention that 4e is inimical to, or otherwise fails to support, exploration-heavy play (which generally seems to be what is meant by roleplaying around here).
Does health play a concern in your story telling?
Yes, and at several levels.
First, it affects the dynamics of action scenes, and the relationship between action scenes - as healing surges drop, tactics and operational strategy change. A sub-component of this is death saves and negative hit points - in a recent combat, one PC was two saves down and had to make a third,
and was close to negative bloodied and still taking ongoing damage. The rest of the party was tied up in spider webs, which would have to be escaped from to heal the PC in question. This was a pretty engaging episode both at the mechanical and at the story level.
Second, it affects larger scale action resolution because healing surges are often expended as part of a skill challenge, and because the possibility of taking an extended rest depends upon the ingame situation.
Third, lingering conditions like diseases, healing surges that can't be regained until a suitable environment is returned to, etc, can have a big impact.
My actual play report gives examples of both 1 and 3 - the affect on tactics of PC health, and the way that the need for a PC to recover from a disease played into the overall dynamic of the unfolding story.
1. Selling a game to people that has rules about dismembering others might not be viewed as something parents would want their children playing, while killing the monster, just making them dead, might not be as bad as turning into Jeffrey Dauhmer.
2. The mountains of rules in order to do so, would take 3 times the number of books to go through those things in ANY edition
Actually, both RQ and RM have slimmer core rules than any edition of AD&D, let alone 3E or 4e. And for those who don't like the way 4e plays, I strongly recommend either game. Rolemaster, in particular, is (in my view) a very underrated system, and nowhere near as difficult to build PCs for or to run as is sometimes suggested.
The ability of previous editions to have the abstract or more close to home "realistic" damage is easier to represent if wanted, while 4th doesn't really lend itself well to that. No video game has the component for missing limbs and such, however you see characters with eye-patches, so it must have happened. Therefore the component in 4th disrupts the suspension of disbelief of people in that, while the possibility was there in previous editions, 4th has removed it from even happening and takes you out of the game world, and into the metagame one much more often.
This doesn't make sense to me. If, in AD&D or 3E, I can introduce NPCs with eye patches, why can't I do the same in 4e. And unlike AD&D, at least, 4e has room for a pretty simple blinding or maiming mechanic - given that when an NPC reaches 0 hp the player in question can declare either "dead" or "unconscious", it is not a very big stretch to also allow the player to declare "unconscious and blinded" or "down with an arm chopped off".
So to the thread itself, has the change been caused because less people care first about the story they are trying to tell and more about the mechanics to do things in the game; then they can flesh out the story later?
I just don't see how you're getting this out of the posts from the 4e players on this thread.
At least in my case, there are situations which in which I (as GM) want to place the PCs. The players then decide how to respond. Of course there thinking about this is influenced by the mechanics (just as it is in 3E, RM etc - they think about the mechanical options open to their PCs, like using spells or using skills). But to suppose that there is no engagement with the fiction would just be wrong.
For example, suppose I tell you the following: a PC had travelled back in time and found an old scroll in a strange language. He case comperehend languages to read the scroll, and used object reading to get images from the scroll's past, to work out who wrote it and how it got to where it is. Have I described anAD&D, 3E, 4e or Rolemaster game? In fact I'm describing the 4e session linked to above - but as far as the dynamics at the table were concerned, it was pretty indisinguishable. (Because this aspect of play doesn't engage 4e's conflict resolution mechanics.) Things were noticeably different on the resolutoin front when the PCs tried to talk to a woman they rescued from magically entrapment in a mirror - this was a skill challenge, so 6 successes were enough - but the aim in play was still the same - talk to this woman and persuade here to be friendly rather than frightened.
While adventuring you gather treasure, but never go about taking things
I don't understand this comment. The PCs in my 4e game take things all the time. And my 4e DMG has a discussion of treasure parcels, which offers guidelines on what sorts of stuff I should scatter around for the PCs to take.
The game has no more reality, so you cannot tell stories based on it and are forced to tell silly stories rather than ones more rooted.
<snip>
sooner or later everyone should be able to see the game has changed forms to a fantastic battle simulator as battle is the prime function of the mechanics, so that you can get to it more often.
Again, I'd be curious to see your response to my actual play example.
