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

[IanB]

As a DM, I am the opposite. I don't want min/maxing. I refuse to run for min/maxers/Char Ops players (as opposed to those that Char Op for theory to see how the system can be pushed and twisted, but don't play that way). There is a reason they had been considered a bane to the hobby and why we, now, get stuck with the 4e skill system with its overly broad skills, lack of skills like performance, and +1/2 per level bonus. I'd rather players create a character with varying ranks of skills to reflect their culture, hobbies, training (formal and/or informal) and develop characters organically. As a DM, I can always take into account their character's skills and proficiency when assigning challenges and their difficulties.

I think maybe you're misunderstanding me. What I don't want is a system that forces a character to choose between things that are effective in one part of the game (say, a utility power that is constantly useful in combat) vs. things that are far less consistently useful but add a lot of flavor (say, a utility power that lets you reroll one specific skill, or turn into a monkey for 5 minutes).

The same goes for skills. When fighters got 2 skill points per level, you would almost never see a fighter character that was also a performer or artist. By moving that sort of thing out of the mechanical rules, it opens character stories up far more. Now when you write up that dwarf fighter with a great singing voice (Chip the glasses and crack the plates!) you aren't going to be crippled by the system expecting you to have points lying around to put half the points you get at all, into a cross class skill that uses a stat you have a racial penalty to. Things are better for RPers now, they can write all that fun flavor stuff into their history without worrying about the minutia of skill ranks, and they can do it without sacrificing mechanical effectiveness compared to other characters at the table. This is good for everyone.

4e achieved this with skills - but the utility powers concept, not quite so much.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I don't think this is necessarily about simulationism... I read very few, if any, narratives where everyone in a group of adventurers suddenly turns out to be great musicians when a musical challenge is encountered. I guess a case could be made for it being gamist, as in everyone has a fair shot at overcoming the challenge. YMMV of course.

No, not necessarily simulationism. It's a tension between setting/genre fidelity, mechanics, and pacing/handling time. You'll get the tension with simulation, gamism, or narrativism. However, it is true that the trade offs you will be willing to make will be somewhat different for simulation or gamism or narrativism. No system every hits it perfectly. Which means that everyone hand waves on skils, whether they know it or not. It is simply which handwaves rub which people the wrong way.

Like Danny, I have a varied set of skills for which I'm reasonably competent, and this was true before I hit college. But like Ryujin, I draw the opposite lesson from this--that even complex skill systems don't handle the way real skill works. Humans, at least, are very much about classification and pattern matching. Being a musician makes learning easier for some higher level math and the timing in weapon play, to name just two odd examples. Name me a game that models that fact. There are all kinds of odd learning connections like that, and we don't even fully understand the ones we know about, let alone the ones we don't.

A simulation game, for example, might try to get around this by getting really specific about what can people can do. Never mind how you learned the higher level math. You've got it or you don't. Nothing wrong with that. And then to continue to be true to sim, it might simply ignore handling or game play issues and decide that things cost roughly as much as they are hard to do (or are represented in the world, or any number of choices). It will be clunky, but design intent is met.

That is a relatively pure approach, but there will still be tradeoffs, even given the design intent. Footwork is vital for melee combat (along with a host of other things). Any melee combat. So you can't, in fact, learn to be really skilled with a gladius without also learning at least a little about every other weapon you could pick up. But even worse, you can't learn a gladius without learning a tiny bit about the skills needed for dance--and vice versa. This doesn't matter much in results. If you are a great dance but have never picked up a blade, the fact that your sword skills shows as -4 instead of the approximately - 3.5 that it really should be is eaten up in the granularity of the system. It does matter a great deal when you look at effort to learn things. And notice that this hypothetical system that I've outlined should care about learning.

Some design choices in games are actually fairly stupid design. But a lot of the design choices that get pegged with that are simply situations where the designer had a trade off that had to be made, and they made it different than you would. Sometimes people go on rants that make it fairly clear that they are unaware that the trade off was even a choice that had to be made.

 

[Imaro]

As a DM, I am the opposite. I don't want min/maxing. I refuse to run for min/maxers/Char Ops players (as opposed to those that Char Op for theory to see how the system can be pushed and twisted, but don't play that way). There is a reason they had been considered a bane to the hobby and why we, now, get stuck with the 4e skill system with its overly broad skills, lack of skills like performance, and +1/2 per level bonus. I'd rather players create a character with varying ranks of skills to reflect their culture, hobbies, training (formal and/or informal) and develop characters organically. As a DM, I can always take into account their character's skills and proficiency when assigning challenges and their difficulties.

Emphasis mine... words to live by. If I as DM do not inform my players of any specifics concerning th campaign that would impact skill selection I should instead be looking to their skills (whatever they may be) to inform my adventure design... not just dismissing them as useless or crap.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Emphasis mine... words to live by. If I as DM do not inform my players of any specifics concerning th campaign that would impact skill selection I should instead be looking to their skills (whatever they may be) to inform my adventure design... not just dismissing them as useless or crap.

That's not a terrible way to compensate, if you must. I'd rather not be forced into it, though, since when I'm DMing, I've got better uses for my time and attention.

 

[fba827]

Rant:

Last night I ran a one-shot session in 4E with half of my group and a couple of friends I made at the FLGS during Encounters. This is primarily to introduce the two groups, to allow socializing time, and to test the 4E ruleset with a group of players accustomed to Pathfinder/3.5 edition.

After explaining to them that I wanted to run a short Chaos Scar adventure (which is essentially a dungeon crawl of 4 or so encounters) just to have a complete adventure in under four hours, I received the following complaint from one of the Pathfinder players (which i'm sure that many of you have already heard):

"4th edition has a great balanced combat system and is fun to play, but it doesn't give you opportunities to roleplay like Pathfinder does."

How can this be the fault of a gaming system? Sure, it may be the fault of the DM (me), the module design (intended as a dungeon crawl), or even the group. Why blame 4E as a killer of roleplaying, interaction, and problem solving?

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.

Sorry. Just need to sound off here.

Retreater

That's quite a fireball of a statement your player made there

In any case, toss me in with the group that disagrees with the statement.

The group I play with has, and can end up, spending more time in role-play discussions/encounters/events than combat. And while I do play with an odd group, I don't think we are some sort of strange alien exception that is the only group that can role-play in 4e.

The system doesn't define that type of limitation. As you (Retreater) said, that's a limitation set by either the DM, the scenario, or the group (or some combination thereof), or by limitations of the player himself/herself.

 

[Imaro]

That's not a terrible way to compensate, if you must. I'd rather not be forced into it, though, since when I'm DMing, I've got better uses for my time and attention.

Compensate for what... empowering the players to direct you in what type of adventuring would be fun for them? Or playing the guessing game with super-broad skills?

 

[Mallus]

Skills like that allow you to actively craft the performance and reflect what you are doing. Much more evocative than perform/perform/perform/perform. Especially if it comes down to a single die roll.

We did this in our 4e campaign when the party challenged a powerful rival to a play-writing duel (a "play-off"!). To write the thing, we used the following checks: Diplomacy (to win the audience's sympathy), Intimidation (for the scary villains), Insight (for art's age-old quest for insights into the human, and demi-human, condition), and an plain INT check (for the plot).

The result was an absolutely charming script with a frightening bad guy, surprisingly psychological depth, and a plot so dumb even Michael Bay would send it back for rewrites.

Here a lack of an appropriate skill led to a much more interesting result.

This would be true.....but Death plays chess-boxing!

I am now picturing a remake of The Seventh Seal starring the Wu-Tang Clan, with the Rizza, no, make that Ol' Dirty Bastard as the wandering knight. Thanks, RC!

I am not ok with 3E having crappy craft skills, because they "tried" and it didn't add much to the game.

My take is simple: 3e had good support for the common adventurer skills. They also had skills like Craft and Profession, which had little to no additional rules support -- outside of "you can write them on your character sheet and put points in them". Which isn't particularly helpful to a DM trying to run an interesting court-room scenario for PC's with Profession: Lawyer.

4e simply removed skills which didn't have meaningful rules attached to them in the first place. Functions with empty code blocks.

I'm curious, what defines a crappy craft skill. As I said in an earlier post I do believe skills are a means for players to communicate to their DM what they are interested in...

Skills can serve as a means of communicating interest, sure. But a skill needs to do something else, in addition to signifying interest. It shouldn't cost a Feat merely to tell the DM I want to play a pirate or a haiku master.

The notion you can't role play in 4E is wrong. 4E is a role playing game, and you can have some pretty intense role play with it if you want to.

The defining factor in the guy's original complaint is just that: if you want to.

The way I see it, 4e doesn't inspire certain folks to role-play. Making it a poor choice for them. Somewhere along the line this morphed as: you can't role-play in 4e.

But like Ryujin, I draw the opposite lesson from this--that even complex skill systems don't handle the way real skill works.

Bingo!

Even the most detailed RPG skill systems are still gross oversimplifications/abstractions. The difference in the level of "realism" or "simulation" between a raw CHA check, Diplomacy, and Perform: Unrealistically Large Category of Performable Art, is vanishing small, at least to me.

 

[Imaro]

Skills can serve as a means of communicating interest, sure. But a skill needs to do something else, in addition to signifying interest. It shouldn't cost a Feat merely to tell the DM I want to play a pirate or a haiku master.

Uhm, no... putting skill points in it signifies interest in having said skill factor into the game... In other words the skill points are currency and you are spending them to let the DM know you want the fact that you are skilled in piracy or haikus to be relevant in the game.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Compensate for what... empowering the players to direct you in what type of adventuring would be fun for them? Or playing the guessing game with super-broad skills?

Pace Mallus, if all it is is a "flag", then just have flags. I don't need flags artificially embedded into the mechanics of the skill system in order to tell me what the players are interested in. Just have flags.

OTOH, if the skills are more than that, they are supposed to represent some kind of mechanical heft (e.g. Danny's example of not everyone is an equally good musician, or any other kinds of heft you want), then they should do that well.

This is exactly what I've been talking about with throwing everything that has a patina of "skill" into the same bucket, and thinking that because you can describe it as a "skill", and you have a "skill system", that it belongs there.

What is particular annoying about it in D&D and similarly abstract games is that it isn't even consistent. I can kind of see it in something like Runequest or Burning Wheel or Hero or GURPS or even Toon (to name some widely divergent examples). You've got "skills" and pretty much everything drives off it--including fighting. But in D&D, "weapon skill" and "sneak/diplomacy/knowledge/athletics/etc." are already in different mechanical categories. So despite the fact that, in heroic fantasy, "sword skill" and "sneak skill" are of similar important, story heft, character scope, and so forth, it is somehow important to separate them? Hmm. OK. But we'll have Pinky the Bard's dabbling in painting represented by ... lumping it in with regular skills?

It's a "level of abstraction error"--like talking about building a house of out of paint molecules, lumber, and rooms--true if you squint at it in an odd way with your tongue hanging out, but not if you think about it very long--and certainly not the correct model for either the chemist, the builder, or the home owner.

Using 3E-type skills for craft and profession as flags only works when you handwave the abstraction error away. So yes, you can compensate for the poor design and get something out of it, but nothing that you couldn't also get from a better system. And if you want them to be more than flags, you sure as heck are compensating for the way they don't really represent what they purport to represent very well, and aren't mechanically scoped correctly for the subject matter in simulation nor gamist terms.

The only way a person pretends not to handwave in this situation is to move back and forth between using them as flags and as something more. We'll use them for something more right up until they break; then we'll use them for flags. We'll use them for nothing but flags right up until we want to make mechanical distinctions with heft; at which point we'll squit, move real fast, and then move on. Pay no attention to the left hand while the right hand is doing its thing.

That groups manage to use this effectively is a testament to the way the human brain can adapt poor tools and get something worthwhile out of it anyway. Yea for us! But it is still a surpremely ill-informed and crappy addition to the skill system.

 

[Ryujin]

I don't think this is necessarily about simulationism... I read very few, if any, narratives where everyone in a group of adventurers suddenly turns out to be great musicians when a musical challenge is encountered. I guess a case could be made for it being gamist, as in everyone has a fair shot at overcoming the challenge. YMMV of course.

MMDV because, out of 5 characters, mine would likely be the only one that had a background relating to some form of entertainment. For example I made up two complementary characters, for our last-lived campaign; Changeling brothers who had been separated during a Drow raid on their family's camp. One was rescued by the Eladrin, to become a 'pet' of the Summer Court; a Bard with Warlord multi-class. The other was taken as a toy, by the Drow, then eventually escaped after obtaining enough magical knowledge to escape his role as jester; a Warlock, with Bard multi-class.

I would suspect that very few characters, in a given group, would tend to have some sort of musical background. One or two, at most, in a group of 5. It would be an opportunity for them to shine, when the generally more physical characters usually tend to more.