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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5577310" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't recall ever suggesting personally that systems don't matter. I'm not sure I think they matter in the way that you do perhaps. At the simplest level D&D provides rules for doing things like casting spells, swinging swords, etc. I may not be interested in that genre and thus I might use a set of rules that for instance includes elements that cover space ships and robots because I feel like playing a sci-fi game. I may also want a game which provides PCs with a different level of capabilities, has more or less abstract resolution systems etc in order to capture the ambiance I'm after, etc. There are a ton of reasons to choose different systems.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. When I choose to have my suicidally bold half-orc fighter rush through a door, that's RP. I don't have to be talking in first person or imagining my character from a 1st person perspective at all times (or even ever at all) to be role playing the character. The dialog at our table would resemble much more a kind of third person perspective narrative from multiple character's viewpoints, with now and then some dialog quoted. 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. I comprehend suspension of disbelief, but I don't find that there is anything inherently about a comprehensive rule system like 4e that necessarily breaks that. I would tend to agree with a statement that overly extensive and restrictive systems get in the way of that, but again I say that restriction is when the rules say "No".And again we come back to AD&D. AD&D is restrictive because it ACTIVELY says "no". A game that simply doesn't have rules for playing an 'elf' isn't saying no, that isn't a restriction, that is simply an unaddressed possibility, which may not even be relevant to the genre of a particular game. 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). We could suppose that the physics of every fantasy world that AD&D depicts includes some kind of law of nature that prevents swords from being held in the hands of wizards, but honestly that's rather silly. So yes, I find 4e to be a very substantially better RPG than AD&D was. In a quite concrete way. Obviously people ignored a lot of the rules of AD&D, but that wouldn't be relevant to the discussion of AD&D's qualities as an RPG any more than pointing out that you could remove powers from 4e and replace them with something else would be relevant to this thread's topic.It is quite possible that my definition of RP and how I go about it, and how the people I usually play with go about it, is unusual in some way. Honestly though I doubt it. I actually suspect that the people I play with are fairly typical RPGers. So my personal conclusion is that 4e does a pretty decent job of facilitating RP. It may not facilitate what you call immersion, but I just don't know.</blockquote>

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