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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5570761" data-attributes="member: 11999">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.  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.</blockquote>

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