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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kichwas" data-source="post: 4299875" data-attributes="member: 891">Just a long-winded theory, but... <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" />RPG players -usually- are very bad at teamwork. Too many iconoclastic personalities.I suspect that 4E 'by the numbers' is a lot easier, if 'played right' - as in, played the way they assumed it would be played. Which is a style table top RPGers are, again usually, not used to.As long as we have so much MMO talk these days, look at how MMOs work. In the low levels you have hordes of players eternally locked in a certain range of content because they just cannot ever manage to learn how to play as team players. Well, they do make it to max level, as many raiding players in just about any MMO can attest, there are stacks of unskilled players beating on the doors of guilds that can handle content demanding to be let in. But they never get far in the 'endgame' - the group content, like raids in WoW (dungeons built for 5, 10, 15, or even as many as 40 person teams).Most of them can do the 'click play' pretty well and pretty fast. Many of them can even 'play' their chosen character -better- than the raiders. What they lack is something they are often not even aware exists on a level outside of their understanding - teamwork. Mastering teamwork in an MMO is really all that really divides the top raiders from the people who never seem to get anywhere. Now to bring this analogy back to table top RPG play...Table top players are long used to being a group of 4 to 8 action hero movie stars. Everyone can shine, everyone acts like they are lead in the film, they are Dirty Harry, or Columbo, or Harry Potter. Sit around most gaming tables and you'll see players vying for the spotlight.Iconoclasts are what they are in part because they fail to comprehend the value of not being what they are... <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" />4E however, is built with a lot of those MMO paradigms of roles in mind. If you don't play to your role, and that is not about what you yourself do, but what you do to enable and sync with the team, then it gets all that much more difficult to master.Get a pack of team players in there with 4E, and they could probably master it faster than they could 3E. Team players know that there is really only one character present at the table - the team. Its a character with 5 heads, but it is still only a single character. It only gets one action per round if it behaves properly - the team action.Varied opinions about 4E aside, the roles in it are very much designed to facilitate over-enabling certain teamwork concepts. Concepts which, first, require setting aside individualism and individual egos. While the role concept and the tricks used to enforce it (things like marking) are very unrealistic, they do in turn reinforce something very real. In actual conflict, teamwork is the only way to go. Iconoclastic behavior, especially the 'action hero notion,' results in bodybags. These 4E mechanics are, to an extent, gimmicks to get around the 'faulty AI' - the DM's limits.The 'role' gimmicks are serving to reward team play. The system comes across as harder when the square pegs of typical table top play try to fit into the round holes 4E is now set up to assume.I suspect once people start getting used to this, you're going to see more comments about the ease of success in 4E - but only once people realize how to play it, and that, I suspect, such play requires -not- being the hero, but just a member of an ensemble cast.</blockquote>

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