We're back to AD&D1

[Scarface6174]

Sounds fine to me. I liked AD&D. I only need rules for combat and action stuff, anyway - the role-playing we can do without any rules.

QFT!

 

[Blackeagle]

What am I missing here people?

4e is new and different, and therefore bad. It will be bad until 5e comes out a decade hence, when 4e will suddenly become everything that was good and true and right.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Rules vs roleplaying

That's got to be the stupidest thing imaginable. Rules don't limit roleplaying, nor do they neccisarily give birth to more roleplaying. Claiming "the more rules you have, the worst your roleplaying!" is stupid. Not every RPG can be Baron Munchausen, nor SHOULD it.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

We have a point here. IMHO, D&D should offer much more than this.

I hate to say it...but, why? I have had a lot of fun killing things and taking their stuff for years and years. Why would I suddenly need more? I mean, I like to have the chance to play a cool character, I like to have an interesting plot and reason why I'm killing monsters. I like to feel heroic so I like thinking that the killing of monsters is helping people.

It's the game I've loved playing for 15 years now. I've destroyed evil cultists, rescued people from drow, traveled through time and space, explored new worlds....and killed the stuff there. But still, it's fun.

You really are a power gamer, don't you? I don't want to create an illusionary chair to distract a monster chargint at me: I would use it to humiliate a NPC that I hate (he tries to sit down and falls to the ground... ). And convincing the local lord to give me his magic items? Come on, we are not 12 years old! Do you still kill the hireling to get XP?

No, I'm just used to dealing with players who will take ANY advantage they can get. Print it in a book and they will find a way to interpret it in such a way that they can use it to WAY more advantage than it should have.

Sure, it's fairly funny to use an illusion to humiliate an NPC you don't like. And that's a fairly harmless use of that power...and worth being a 1st level power. However, the question becomes what happens when people take that power and use it in a combat situation? What happens when one of my players sees a spell that says "Make an illusionary object any size up to huge" and thinks "What if I made it look like a dragon? That should scare away the orcs, right?"?

Then, I have an adventure with a big climax where the players fight the Orc chieftan and his elite guard. And it has to be decided by my interpretation of whether or not the monsters fall for the illusionary dragon. Not very fair for the players. And if I decide that they run away from the dragon...it is rather anticlimactic. You run into the room filled with the most powerful Orcs in the tribe after fighting your way past their vast hordes, you finally stand before their leader. Then you make him run away with an illusion of a dragon. The end.

From a balance point of view, the question becomes: Why is it that I should give a power that can defeat all the monsters in an encounter to one person but not to the fighter? The player of the fighter shouldn't feel like he picked a weak class.

I thought everyone hated railroaded adventures, but I see I'm wrong.

These are the sort of adventures WOTC SELLS to people all the time. They not only like them, they pay money for them. I know, since I volunteer to help edit and write adventures for the RPGA(for both 3rd and 4th Ed). I mean, this is about average for Living Greyhawk adventures and I've heard numbers as high as 200,000 as to the number of people who play in the campaign.

I've mentioned this in another thread...but most people like to have an interesting plot in a game. I know, if left entirely to my own devices I can wander around in a game world and amuse myself for about 2 hours before I get bored. I've come pretty close to timing it. After that, I want a plot of some sort to reveal itself. I want a villager to be attacked and I have to defend him or I want a mysterious cloaked man to offer me a job. And I want those things to be part of a larger story that I have to discover.

And as soon as you put a plot into your game, you need to railroad, at least a bit. After all, by having a plot you need to make sure the players stay on it. You need to give clues in order to lead people to further parts of the adventure. If they follow those clues, there is now a rail of sorts. Heck, the best adventures ARE railroaded.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

4e is new and different, and therefore bad. It will be bad until 5e comes out a decade hence, when 4e will suddenly become everything that was good and true and right.

Alternately, 4e is new and different, and therefore good. It will be good until 5e comes out in a decade hence, when 4e will suddenly become everything that was horrible and wrong with society.

 

[Joe Sala]

4e says the Rogue is a striker. Why are they defined by their combat role? Why don't they describe a rogue in an archetypal fashion, about the stealth, cunning, traps, locks, backstab kind of way? Why not set the scene instead of boiling the class down to a combat role? Yes, they still do the theivery skill stuff, but why is the language so combat oriented?

AT LAST! This is what I wanted to say! Thanks my gnome friend!

(BTW, If have problems writing my ideas or some of my sentences look weird it's because English is my third language, and not my first)

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Oh dear, the rules emphasize combat.

Here I was hoping the books would contain multiple pages about how to roleplay a dwarf in ways other than just giving him a scottish accent. Perhaps I will cancel my preorder.

 

[Thasmodious]

4e says the Rogue is a striker. Why are they defined by their combat role?

They are not defined as characters by their role. The role defines their, get this, role in combat. Nothing else. It doesn't define the character. Seriously, what is so hard for some people to grasp about that? The rogue may or not be a striker in the sack, he could just as easily be a controller or a leader, its up to the player. A character, as always, is defined by the player.

The rules deal with task resolution because that is what the rules are needed for. You don't need the rules to adjudicate the party sitting around a tavern fireplace swapping tales with a bard and the locals. You need rules when the rogue wants to climb a tower or the fighter wants to hit things with large, sharp objects. Or when the cleric needs to convince the high priest of his church to give magical aid to the party.

What the 4e books do provide is a lot of information on roleplaying, building characters, designing campaigns and building game worlds. But even after someone details the 25 pages on roleplaying that open the PHB and I detailed earlier how the bulk of the DMG is about world building, DMing, crafting stories, NPCs, skill challenges, and other such things, some of you will remain unconvinced because you want to. You've built a belief system around an idea formed through a complete lack of information and now won't let anything interfere with your perfectly good, baseless belief system.

 

[Mallus]

Oh dear, the rules emphasize combat.

Why that goes against 30 years of D&D tradition!

 

[Morrus]

My opinion is that D&D4 is heavily combat oriented: kill the monster, take the stuff, increase your level.

How was 3.x NOT an xp-for-killing game?

Background and origin feats, to better define the character.

I personally dislike those. Roleplaying aspects should not have limiting or defining mechanics. If you want your character to have a abckground, just give him one.

More subtle powers for the wizard (where are the illusions? the enchantments? the knowledge spells?)

Agreed - the Wizard class is more specialised than it was. Those powers come in PHB2, apparently.

Advice about how to run mystery or horror games.

Eh, I don't want to pay for advice. I appreciate some people might.

Adventures less based on encounters (you play A, then B, then C... one per hour of game play)

You lost me there. What adventures are you referring to? There's only one (KotS). You know you're supposed to write your own, right? That means they're exactly how you want them. That has nothing to do with the core rules.

Basically, the rules define how the mechanics work in your game (combat, climbing, swimming, riding). The rules deal with the physical world. Your imagination deals with the roleplaying side of it, not a rulebook.