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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5575434" data-attributes="member: 2067">Aw, you can totally roleplay in 4e! Nothing stops you but yourself!Hmm...y'know, while I might dismiss a more extreme position, I can kind of see where they might be coming from in certain respects.A game system absolutely has an effect on what you tend to do with it. Nothing in 4e prohibits or dismisses roleplaying, and if that's what you want to do for a session, nothing will stop you. But there are subtler effects.Take, for instance, combats that last an hour. These are not out of the norm in 4e (IMXP). They are much rarer in Pathfinder (if only because of a SCRY-BUFF-TELEPORT trifecta, or a "Whoever Gains Initiative Wins" issue, or a "5 dudes vs. 1 monster" tendancy). If you fill the same 3 hour void with Pathfinder and with 4e, and run the same amount of combats, you'll get different amounts of RP time in depending on what you play. Pathfinder combat might not be the best balanced thing in the world, but it doesn't stick around for nearly as long as 4e's adroitly balanced combats can.Or take the "implied setting" issue. Pathfinder's setting is explicitly Golarion, and it has a wealth of interesting, unique hooks to draw a given player in and make them a part of the world. 4e's implied setting is much weaker, and even when it's there, there's still so much for the DM to fill in, and PCs are such anomalies that they sort of struggle to fit in, even when they have a place. That can be a strength of 4e if you're looking to fill in your own world, but it can also be a weakness if you're looking for some meaty flavor that comes with the territory. Speaking of, take the "encounter-centric design" issue. Away from combat, 4e doesn't give you many tools to interact with the game world (skills...and the list is pretty slim, and favors certain ability scores depending on the situation, and Skill Challenges are weak). Pathfinder gives you more "RP Abilities" (such as several spells that are useless in direct combat). 4e's position that the DM/Group can take care of these without rules isn't always borne out, or is done in a way that isn't satisfying to play through. Pathfinder has a lot of flaws in this area itself (there's plenty of games that do a noncombat challenge much better than either 4e OR Pathfinder), but it's slightly stronger than 4e. This doesn't mean you can't roleplay in 4e. This means that 4e, in comparison to Pathfinder, might not give you as many opportunities to role play. You'll have to take them, design them in, use your DM's power to bring them to bear.Which means if you're a combat-centric DM, and the module you're running is a combat-heavy slog, you've got everything working against you. You can roleplay easily in 4e, 4e just doesn't give you much incentive to do it, and it gives you a few reasons not to, in comparison to Pathfinder. Of course, a lot of games do better than Pathfinder, too, but if what we're comparing is a black pot and a grey kettle, well, one of them is clearly "more white" than the other. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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