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

[Raven Crowking]

I would argue that character concept is quite central to RP. In fact my DEFINITION of RP is quite closely tied to character concept in practice. Depicting the actions of the character, taking into account all the various things that make up that character's capabilities, personality, resources, etc IS in my definition RP.

Playing the character is role-playing. Character concept, in the way you used it in the post I was responding to, was about concept of character prior to creation. Restrictions on what a character can be at that point are utterly seperated from role-playing a character once established.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

So, I will accept your point 1. In fact to me point 1 IS RP. Nothing else is required. Point 2 I don't honestly think I understand since I have not yet heard a coherent description of what does and doesn't constitute immersion.

2. How much and how often do the rules break immersion in role?

Well, in your case, this seems to occur here:

No, AD&D goes beyond that. It actually says "you, wizard, you are forbidden to take this action which isn't justified in any way within the fiction and exists for purely mechanical reasons." That's inhibiting RP. I CANNOT in AD&D make a wizard that will pick up a sword and hit someone with it if he's got no other option, or if the logic of his personality and circumstance would dictate that as an action which would be most in line with his character (unless of course I restrict myself to certain other choices which are related to swinging swords purely by arbitrary fiat of the rules).

And, while you must be aware that this rule did not break immersion for many others, equally you must be aware that some of 4e's rules do for many others. I very much doubt that there is any rule one can institute which will not damage immersion for someone.

As I said before, this second part is going to be highly subjective. That doesn't, however, mean that it should not be discussed....or that it cannot be discussed, calmly and respectfully, without automatically being perceived as "edition warring" or calling what someone else likes "wrongbadfun".

I.e., your complaint here about 1e is perfectly valid. So, too, are the complaints of some others about 4e. Not every complaint about 1e is equally valid, nor is every complaint about 4e.

But examining where immersion breaks on the hard rocks of the rules is of particular value to game designers, IMHO. It is of perhaps slightly less value to game players, but it is still of value nonetheless.

Again, IMHO.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

1. People say you can't RP with 4e

Who said that?

I think that is a strawman, but I would be interested in being proven wrong.

AFAIK, some people claimed greater difficulty, not impossibility, and that is a reasonable thing to claim. Just as, for example, AbdulAlhazred might have had greater difficulty role-playing a magic-user in 1e because magic-users could not use swords.


RC

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Playing the character is role-playing. Character concept, in the way you used it in the post I was responding to, was about concept of character prior to creation. Restrictions on what a character can be at that point are utterly seperated from role-playing a character once established.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Mmmm, yes and no. I agree that once a character concept is established all you can say about rules which restrict you to certain concepts is that you have more limited choices to start with, sure.

OTOH the rule I was citing from 1e does a bit more than that. It seems to forbid the character from taking an action in-game. Honestly the 1e rules are pretty ambiguous on this point, but they seem to forbid something like an M.U. picking up a sword AT ALL during play. Truthfully it is a rather nitpicky thing, but it is a good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

2. How much and how often do the rules break immersion in role?

Well, in your case, this seems to occur here:

And, while you must be aware that this rule did not break immersion for many others, equally you must be aware that some of 4e's rules do for many others. I very much doubt that there is any rule one can institute which will not damage immersion for someone.

As I said before, this second part is going to be highly subjective. That doesn't, however, mean that it should not be discussed....or that it cannot be discussed, calmly and respectfully, without automatically being perceived as "edition warring" or calling what someone else likes "wrongbadfun".

I.e., your complaint here about 1e is perfectly valid. So, too, are the complaints of some others about 4e. Not every complaint about 1e is equally valid, nor is every complaint about 4e.

But examining where immersion breaks on the hard rocks of the rules is of particular value to game designers, IMHO. It is of perhaps slightly less value to game players, but it is still of value nonetheless.

Again, IMHO.


RC

I didn't, intentionally at any rate, disparage anyone else's point of view. I do think there's a fundamental difference in approach that I find makes a big difference in favor of 4e to me, and that it is orthogonal to rules complexity (or more rules volume, I think that 1e in many ways is actually more complicated than 4e is). I generally feel like the 4e rules will get out of my way, whereas AD&D and 3.x not so much.

Maybe we should define 'immersion' as "what happens when you have to compromise what happens in game to accommodate the rules"? I don't think that happens a lot in 4e in a particularly intrusive way. I think that is a strength of exception based design, you always have a very generalized set of basic core rules to lean on. Older editions of D&D were always tossing another subsystem at you that produced wonkiness or just prohibited this or that. In 4e my wizard can pick up the fullblade and swing it. Not with terribly good effect, but at least the rules got out of my way and let me try.

I'd think the most useful direction that a discussion like this can take is actually "where do we go from here"? I mean anything can be improved. No doubt there are going to be ways to improve 4e that we can all agree on.

 

[Raven Crowking]

OTOH the rule I was citing from 1e does a bit more than that.

Yes. For you, it seems to fall under my second point. I.e., the rule gets in the way of immersion. You have to leave your role (magic-user) to figure out how the mechanics work (why don't I pick up the sword and start swinging?).

This is no different than, in 4e, when someone has to figure out how a power works, IMHO.

The only real difference is this: Some are bothered by the first example, some are not. Some are bothered by the second example, some are not. Neither is "right", Neither is "wrong".

I didn't, intentionally at any rate, disparage anyone else's point of view.

By Crom's Cold Britches, you did not! But, in formulating my reply to you, I had to take into account that it wasn't a private conversation.


RC

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

How much of this argument is just people being either or both stubborn about their choice of game due to emotions or lazy either creatively or reading wise with the new edition?

Good question, probably best answered individually.

Personally, I disagree with the idea you can't RP in 4Ed, but do feel the system has RP constraints, speedbumps & oddities that I don't care for...just like nearly every other RPG I've ever played.

But if you have a playstyle that you feel a game does not support well- if it repeatedly has you butting your head against a system's constraints- you may well feel you cannot RP within that system...a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If, for example, 100% of my PCs over 34 years in gaming were musicians of some kind, I wouldn't play 4Ed at all. It the group were playing that, I'd still hang out or something, but I wouldn't play. However, there's more to my RP style than that, and I can find plenty of room to come up with interesting and engaging PC concepts that completely avoid my issues with 4Ed...and some that really play into the system's strengths.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'll hold my tongue at most of the post this was taken from to only address this (regarding Scheherezade):

Proficiency with magic, whip, and rapier. Ability to wear chain mail. Medium BAB. Yup, that all fits...

Dude, that's a classic strawman regarding D&D and mapping figures of myth, legend and fiction to its character classes.

There is seldom, if ever, a perfect fit. The skalds and other singing characters of northern European myths didn't use whips or rapiers...and many favored heavy blades & axes. On the flipside, Orpheus wasn't much for wearing armor or fighting at all.

Most D&D classes are chimaera; catch-alls of characteristics from a variety of sources so that you can take a broad range of characters and shohorn 'em in. Sometimes, they'll be overbroad. Sometimes, they'll seem oddly restrictive.

Let me ask you, would you have typed out a similar reply if I had said Achilles should probably be a Fighter because he didn't wear Chainmail or Plate and probably wasn't proficient in crossbow, Glaive and bastard swords? Is Aragon any less a D&D ranger because he doesn't have an Animal Companion or cast spells? Are Jeanne D'Arc, Lancelot du Lac and Roland not paladins because they couldn't summon a mount from thin air?Wouldn't you use the D&D Monk for a martial artist in a classic Chinese wushu film even if he mixed his Kung Fu with a spear?

Replies like the one I quoted don't help anyone's arguments.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Wow, that's weird because in my Pathfinder corebook... I can actually create stuff with the craft skill... and there are certainly mechanics for it... imagine that!! Now I can understand you not liking how the mechanics are implemented... but they are there. It also gives me the time it takes, cost in materials, what happens on failures, etc. It is perfectly possible to mechanically run a crafting competition between characters and have a mechanical winner... either through speed of construction, quality of construction (by trying for a masterwork item as opposed to a regular) or a combination/permutation of the two factors. So what exactly is it that mechanically is missing... and please this isn't about if you perfer the way it is handled or not because that wasn't your claim above.

Profession could use some work if you want a more codified approach, but the baseline is still there for a check if you're performing a task that falls under that profession and you want to know whether you succeeded or not... there are DC's for knowledge pertaining to your profession and again the baseline for measuring your skill in said profession versus someone else's is there... so what exactly are you looking for?

Perform gives you DC's to determine the quality of your performance, how much money you could earn from a performance and so on... so again what are you looking for?

Something mechanically relevant. I already conceded that the money earned from a performance met that criteria--though so niche, that I don't think it worth the rest of the hassle that comes with it.

How is the above mechanically relevant in any way that couldn't be better handled some other way? Game play? The gold amounts are trivial, and the decision points non-existent. Simulation? It is a very poor simulation of medieval crafting, both in the time and materials. Even allowing for magic entering into the crafting (which is not at all supported by the text), it doesn't match any literature I ever read. Narrativism? It is so far off that, I can't even determine an example to show how it fails. But let's not limit ourselves to GNS. How about "flagging player interest"? We already discussed that one. If you want flags, why a silly formula for amount earned? Drama? All the drama from it comes from straight roleplaying. Background? OK, useful, but again not mechanically relevant. (You may get some story relevance out of it, but again, like "flags" , you could have gotten that much easier in several other ways.)

About the best you can do with it, is that if the DM works at it, he can contrive a situation where the rules will be mechanically relevant--e.g. set up a big scene where the performance must be tried and something dramatic happens either way. But nothing in the mechanics helps the DM achieve that. If the DM is inexperienced, quite the contrary--the banality of the mechanics can drag down whatever the DM was trying to achieve.

Remember how this tangent started. I'm all for solid mechanics that make crafting or performance mechanically meaningful (in the right system). But barring that threshold, I'd rather not have them at all. They just get in the way. If you want to answer Danny's objection--that certain characters be mechanically supported as superior in some way, then a better way to handle it in 3E would have been to use feats. Take a feat, you can play the flute or work as a blacksmith or whatever. Kind of like "Craft Wand". If, OTOH, you want fine-grain differences, so that Harry the Halfling, gifted amateur flute player can compete against Bob the Bard, trained traveling lute fiend--then a single skill roll on Perform may almost work--but of course, like any opposed checks with d20 skill, you'll have to do that a lot or not pay much attention to the fine print. Hide vs Perception works because--it is done a lot, and that +2 advantage that Snook the Rogue has, matters over time.

In 4E, BTW, a better way to handle this would have been to simply say, given the vibrant, 4-color means of 4E, that bards play music, and that's that. If you want to play and not be mainly a bard, multiclass into bard and pick up that ability. Of course, that still doesn't handle crafting, but you can't have everything.

 

[the Jester]

The first is probably more objective than the second, as one can easily see that neighing while moving the horse in chess isn't a meaningful decision, but it is still subjective to some (and perhaps some not-inconsiderable) degree.

Ahem.

Knight.

 

[Mallus]

I'm all for solid mechanics that make crafting or performance mechanically meaningful (in the right system). But barring that threshold, I'd rather not have them at all.

Thanks for summing up how I feel (succinctly, too). I should probably add I'm comfortable with having the rules describe only a small part of my characters, the tip of the fictional iceberg, so to speak.

I also wonder what people's reactions are to other systems which do the same thing -- focus on the "adventuring" skills and leave off the rest.

My group recently suspended our D&D 4e campaign and started playing Savage Worlds. It's a great little system, both compact and universal, with a fairly robust character creation system, full of various interesting knobs to twiddle.

But there's no real crafting system. No Perform: X, either (despite illustrations of nightclub singers and stage magicians in the book). There are professional feats, but they're not analogous to to 3e's Profession: X skill.

There are specific rules for making weird science gadgets/drugs, a Feat which allows you to repair your helicopter with duct tape and toothpicks, a la McGyver, and so on.

But if you want your character to be able to bake a world-class Linzer torte, dance like Fred Astaire, or build a stellar piece of Mid-Century Modern furniture... well, that's between you, your GM, and the generic task resolution system provided. SW isn't so different for 4e is this regard.

Is it difficult to role-play using Savage Worlds. If not, why?

BTW, I'm now picturing an espionage campaign in which Charles and Ray Eames are agents working for an secret outfit called the International Style...

 

[Raven Crowking]

Ahem.

Knight.

I know that!

(I wonder where my brain was at when I wrote "horse"?)