D&D 4E The "We Can't Roleplay" in 4E Argument

[Dannyalcatraz]

Think of it as an accumulation of little mechanical/fluff changes that have accreted into a more combat-centric playstyle.

For instance, the 3.X version of the spell Hypnotism can explicitly be used in or out of combat. The 4Ed version, in contrast, has a very specific effect defined by its role in combat. Any non-combat use of it require's a DM's expansion of the power.

I guess what I'm saying is that, overall, its not that you CAN'T roleplay in 4Ed- that's clearly not the case- but rather that the roleplay space in the game is more constrained. While still vast, the restrictions are real and perceivable. Its like the concept of variably sized infinite sets: the set of numbers between 1 and 2 is infinite...but it is less infinite than the set of all numbers.

And for some, those constraints on roleplay gets equated with an absolute inability to roleplay.

 

[Keldryn]

There is absolutely nothing in 4E that prevents people from role-playing. That's an utterly ridiculous claim to make.

On the other hand, I've been having a very difficult time getting my 4E games to be more than one hour of fiddly and mechanical combat followed by 15 minutes of light role-playing and exploration, repeated 3 or 4 times throughout the night. Two of my players are new to D&D, and the other two have played for 10 years (started with 3e) and 24 years (my sister, started with BECMI). I've been playing and DMing for 24 years (started with BECMI), and I am having tremendous difficulty moving beyond running the game as more than a series of battles with four or five stat blocks which each contain 2 or 3 attack powers, a triggered power, and sometimes an aura.

After using Viscious Mockery for the sixth time in the last session, my sister just gave up trying to explain how it enraged and caused psychic damage to the grey ooze. Trying to rationalize how power effects work in the context of the game world when it doesn't quite make sense really pulls us out of the game.

The two new players have a hard time getting into their characters' mindsets when they have to manage half a dozen powers and keep track of whether or not they get a +2 bonus to damage this turn.

Now I've only talked about combat here, but unless we only have one combat encounter per session -- which then needs to be a major one or else it's a cakewalk when they can use all of their daily powers -- then we spend three quarters of our time moving miniatures across the battle grid.

I think that I'm a pretty good DM, and I've been doing this for a long time, but I've never had such difficulty keeping role-playing in an RPG. A better DM than I can probably manage it well enough, but I'm starting to feel that it's beyond my abilities.

The design team focused on balancing the game in terms of contributions to combat encounters, and those combat encounters are intended to be tactically engaging and last a certain amount of time. However, the DMG is full of great advice on running non-combat situations and handling things outside of the rules. It's a weird dichotomy that I just can't seem to reconcile. The tactical combat game is certainly not the be-all and end-all of 4E, but the game's design is deeply rooted in it and it is complex enough mechanically that it inevitably takes over the players' mindshare (including me) and we simply forget to engage in the game's fiction for a while.

Is this the fault of the game system? No, although I think that the game system certainly influences this. Adventure design and my weaknesses as a DM are ultimately at fault.

I even added some roleplaying and story elements to the introduction of the adventure. No one seemed interested in interacting, so I moved on to the exploration and combat encounters.

When I first started up my 4E game, I was disappointed that my players weren't very interested in interacting with the world. Interestingly enough, when we took a break and played a couple of sessions of Basic D&D, everybody was interacting with the world and having a blast with it. When we resumed our 4E game, we were back to a general sense of apathy in terms of role-playing and interacting with the world.

It's great that many gamers are able to take the 4E system and be deeply engaged within the game world. For some players, such as myself and the members of my group, the crunchy bits require enough attention so as to leave very little left for interacting with the fictional elements of the game. So I can see where those players are coming from; yes, 3.5/PF has a great deal of crunch, but somehow I never found it nearly as disruptive to staying focused on the fictional game world.

 

[Pentius]

This tired old argument gets trotted out every once in awhile, usually(I presume) by someone who hasn't already done it to death. I usually respond with "What's stopping you? And if it's so powerful, why isn't it stopping me?"

 

[Mercurius]

The argument is wrong.

[/thread]

 

[Kobold Boots]

After using Viscious Mockery for the sixth time in the last session, my sister just gave up trying to explain how it enraged and caused psychic damage to the grey ooze. Trying to rationalize how power effects work in the context of the game world when it doesn't quite make sense really pulls us out of the game.

I'll offer a piece of advice from a guy that used to have these kinds of arguments at the table prior to 4e when explaining "magic". Just abstract the explanation and you solve the problem.

Using your example of viscious mockery.. the bard may make a lewd comment to mock an ooze, but the magic of it produces the translation and desired effect. It's not for the bard to know why it works and the ooze doesn't understand common.. but the power works because the bard magically ends up pissing off the ooze.

If you try to explain it beyond that, you're distracting from the game and creating "negative time" where players end up complaining instead of being caught in the setting.

I think that I'm a pretty good DM, and I've been doing this for a long time, but I've never had such difficulty keeping role-playing in an RPG. A better DM than I can probably manage it well enough, but I'm starting to feel that it's beyond my abilities.

The fact that you care enough about your game to have a logical explanation for the powers shows that you've got the stuff to be a good DM, but you're falling into the modern DM/fantasy milieu trap. Magic makes magic happen. If your players can explain magic, it's not magic.

Is this the fault of the game system? No, although I think that the game system certainly influences this. Adventure design and my weaknesses as a DM are ultimately at fault.

Another sign that you're a good DM. You're attributing yourself as part of the problem. Whenever a game goes down the wrong street the DM is at least half responsible and usually a lot more.

It's great that many gamers are able to take the 4E system and be deeply engaged within the game world. For some players, such as myself and the members of my group, the crunchy bits require enough attention so as to leave very little left for interacting with the fictional elements of the game. So I can see where those players are coming from; yes, 3.5/PF has a great deal of crunch, but somehow I never found it nearly as disruptive to staying focused on the fictional game world.

I expect that everyone is going to have different experiences that impact their feelings about 3E and 4E. Mine are that I used to hate running combats in earlier versions of D&D. There wasn't enough to keep players involved during combat and it eventually dragged into the following sequence.

1. Roll initiative.
2. Move
3. Roll to hit or Buff or magic goes off.

Usually magic was overpowered, and martial types rolled a D20 and got standard damage.

So what would take the place of a lot of combat in my early edition 6-8 hour games? Role-playing. There was more to do, and more options for storytelling because combat was.. hate to say it.. dull.

So with 4e you see a lot of work done to "game" the combat into something that required mental attention and acted a lot like a game within a game. Combats take longer because everyone needs to think ahead, not just the casters, AND characters have synergies, AND the situation can change from round to round.

(Not to say that the last bit isn't true in early editions, situations did change then as well, but that usually didn't have such a big impact on what players did.)

On Role-playing and skill checks.

If you want to defeat the rolling role-play, make the players role-play the encounter before allowing them a skill check and add a bonus or penalty to the roll based on what they role-play.

If you want to use skill challenges, same thing. Make them come up with a plan that fits the skill challenge, before rolling the skill challenge and be flexible with what you have planned.

If you want to run a role-play heavy game one week, you can do it. Just don't set up a combat encounter and set experience awards appropriate to the risk of failure. If they're going full rp against characters with the same skill levels in appropriate things, then it's a decent base level encounter award should they succeed.

I could go on, but I think I've over-written as is.

Best,
KB

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

The ability to role play using a given system, whether in or out of combat, depends upon the group in question. IF you wish to simply treat 4E combat like a board game with no regards to the characters motivations and the circumstances surrounding conflict, that is your decision. If you with to devovle social skill challenges into a series of dice rolls, you can do that. You also the concentrate on the why of your characters actions as well as the how.

 

[Herschel]

People who have grown dependent on skills being outlined for them have trouble adapting when given relative carte blanche. Instead of seeing skill ranks in swimming, for example, now it's much more open. You want to swim? It's a basic athletic endeavor. Characters aren't as specialized outside of combat and that throws some people for a loop.

 

[Dausuul]

After using Viscious Mockery for the sixth time in the last session, my sister just gave up trying to explain how it enraged and caused psychic damage to the grey ooze. Trying to rationalize how power effects work in the context of the game world when it doesn't quite make sense really pulls us out of the game.

It was watching a bard kill three minions in a row with Vicious Mockery that led me to ban bards from every 4E game I ever run*. It's not because I think the class is broken or overpowered or even excessively fiddly... but every time a bard uses a power called "Vicious Mockery" or "Satire of Fortune" or "Disorienting Ditty" to kill something, I start grinding my teeth. Just. Freaking. NO.

The good news is, there's actually not too much of this nonsense in 4E. Most of it can be taken care of just by banning bards and artificers, then applying the errata to Come and Get It. That still leaves a bunch of powers that are damned hard to come up with fiction for (mostly divine powers for some reason), but few that just yank me bodily out of whatever immersion I've managed to get going.

[size=-2]*When and if they release an Essential-ized bard, I may reconsider.[/size]

It's great that many gamers are able to take the 4E system and be deeply engaged within the game world. For some players, such as myself and the members of my group, the crunchy bits require enough attention so as to leave very little left for interacting with the fictional elements of the game.

Yup. I have run into the same issue.

...You know what? I think I just realized a big reason why I have so much trouble with this in 4E. It's not because of the level of crunch or the battlemat dependence or any of that. It's very simply this: They separated the mechanical text from the flavor text.

3E was loaded with crunchy mechanics, but they were woven together with the fiction. You couldn't skip the flavor text and go straight to the rules bits; in order to find out what your fireball spell did in mechanical terms, you had to read the description of what it was doing in the game world. And every time you went back to check on the details, you got it reinforced. 4E strips out the flavor text, and puts it in italics so you know you can ignore it, and puts it up at the top of the statblock away from everything else. It's not in parentheses, capital letters, or quotated, but it might as well be.

As a result, I have to make a conscious effort to read the flavor text. If I don't, I just skim right past it to get to the mechanical meat. I would really like to see 4E re-integrate the two.

 

[Riastlin]

Personally, I think there are a few issues at work here (in no particular order):

1. The multitude of powers a PC has detracts from their RP ability in combat. In older editions, the fighter more or less swung. Occasionally charged, maybe even grappled or bull rushed (though those were often rare depending on the group). As such, it was always "clear" what action the player would take, so instead, they focused on what they'd "say". "I glare at the orc and let loose a shout of defiance. 'For Tempus!' *roll* "Yeah! That's gonna hurt!" Now the player often has to wait until its his or her turn to know which power to use and then each power is a little bit different meaning that a saying that works for one power might not work for another. Instead of spending their time between actions thinking about what they'll say, they're thinking about what they're even gonna do.

2. Combats are much easier to design for DMs now. I can design for encounters in less than half an hour if I'm really pressed. Not only that, I can make them feel as though they belong together. In earlier editions though, it would sometimes take an hour to design a single encounter if I wanted it to be more than 'just an ogre'. If I wanted an encounter with a major villain or recurring villain? Yikes, it could take me more than hour just to stat out that one villain -- then I had to give him body guards and the like, then hope that the encounter fell into an appropriate difficulty range, etc. The result was that I often threw in a "roleplay" encounter strictly for the purpose of eating time in a session because I didn't have enough encounters planned out. Add to this the fact that (at least for me) skill challenges are the hard part of the game to design now and you have even more incentive to go from combat to combat. I love the skill challenge concept, but I confess that I am not very good at implementing it. Worse still, players know that when a SC crops up, they really need to make sure they get it right because there are now tangible rewards (XP) for doing it right and tangible penalties (less XP, loss of surges, etc.) for doing it wrong. This leads a lot of players to simply say "Arcana!" rather than taking the time to describe it. Rather they know Arcana is their strong suit so they try to use it.

3. Combat was made much more dynamic. In earlier editions, a combat was often decided (or at least heavily weighted) by the initiative rolls. This was particularly true (and still is to an extent) with single creature encounters. If the bullette came up last on initiative, it might not even get an attack in. Now, even if the PCs all get to go first, its still going to take at least 2 - 3 full rounds (likely more) to decide a combat. Personally, I think that this actually makes combat more fun, but that's a different discussion. The side effect though, I think, is that we spend so much more time thinking about combat now because we have to. When we get out of combat though its almost like we need a breather since we've been on edge for the last 45 - 60 minutes. Unfortunately, this isn't a good time to then try to get involved in a deep philosophical discussion with the local duke. Players are running to the bathroom or refilling the soda, etc. Ironically though in older editions, in some respects (particularly for the martial classes) combat was a bit of that breather time since it was often "I swing." (yes I know I am over simplifying it).

4. Power Cards. Finally, as previously stated, the power cards naturally draw our attention to them. Unfortunately though there are no cards for roleplaying (nor could there be really). Although its in no way true, it seems at times as though roleplaying is that thing you do between combats which kind of gives it second class citizen status to many.

All of these are simply my personal opinions and experiences; however, I really think that they have kind of combined to create this perfect storm wherein people believe that there's little to know actual RP in 4ed. As stated previously, there's absolutely no reason you can't RP in 4ed. However, it often seems as though the system is really encouraging you to ignore roleplaying in favor of rollplaying.

Just my 4 coppers.

 

[Incenjucar]

I've never seen anyone have difficulty RPing with 4th edition outside of early experiences with Encounters - because it's Encounters. I HAVE seen players not really get into RPing -while in combat-, so you just need to make sure that there is ample time out of combat where they can't just hide behind their stats.