Our group actually grabbed a few of the WotC adventures to try out the 4E system, partly so that we could learn the system and partly because the DM (me) is a lazy bastard. In our first two sessions (totaling about 9 hours) we managed two combat encounters which lasted about an hour each. The other 6-7 hours were spent in the premade town provided by the setting. So, I find the claims about 4E (and the published campaigns) being light on RP and fluff intriguing, because it’s the opposite of what we ran into.

Additionally, I would call the remarks concerning the fighter entry into question. I would argue that the 4E PHB has more fluff than the 3.x PHB. Yes, there’s less up front, but every skill and ability entry comes packaged with fluff describing the fighter’s prowess and specialization. And considering how many pages of abilities are dedicated to the fighter, that’s a lot of fluff.

It’s a different sort, yes. It is geared more toward combat, yes. It’s still fluff though. And personally I’ve found it has had an interesting effect on our group. In the 3.x system our players tended to approach combat in a very statistical and monotone manner. It was very much the “I swing my axe at the Goblin” tendency. With the fluff provided for every ability the approach has changed to be much more colourful. Now you hear things like “I swing my axe in, attempting to create an opening for ___” or “I take careful aim ensuring that I hit” or similar. The fluff that 4E provides has added roleplay to our combat encounters.

@der_kluge: It was Dave Arneson, not Gary Gygax, who first said, \”Let\’s make this about the individual heroes.\” Gygax was just the one who had some savvy at marketing. I was there at the roots of the role-playing movement over 30 years ago — already playing when the first D&D hardcover book was published — and I will give Gygax props for accomplishing many important things, but he was no bastion of narrative and characterization. He was a simulationist, obsessed with microscopic, nitty-gritty detail and his own concepts of \”realism\” — if you needed someone to tell one pole-arm from another, he was your man — but for as long as he was associated with D&D, he viewed the PCs as disposable playing pieces (can we say, \”cloak of poisonousness\”, boys and girls?), not the leading characters in a story. Like most of my friends from that \”golden era\” of role-playing gone by, I all but stopped playing D&D after high school in favor of the many other games coming out that were so much more conducive to telling solid, believable, nuanced stories. So, sorry to speak ill of the dead, but this popular image of Gary Gygax as the patron saint of role-play (as opposed to roll-play) is just the result of out-of-control nostalgia and Gygax\’s own PR.

As for fluff, the monsters are in the Compendium but it’s no more than what’s in the books.

First, when I need to get the fluff for my fighters, kobolds, et al, I can still grab my 3.0/3.5 books (or earlier). 4.0 doesn’t make that ink fade.

Second, This doesn’t work when they make a new monster or change an old one. That makes me sad. Perhaps they plan on putting all of the fluff behind the Insider Subscription wall?

Everything else was optional that I couldn’t count on. Even weapon specialization, the one bone fighters got over classes, was an optional one.

3.x helped with all of the feats. The fluff? Didn’t help me at all. None of what they said about fighters was guaranteed to be true from one campaign to the next, and none of it was guaranteed to be true about my fighter. The fluff that was useful to me was fluff that applied equally to every character, without regard to race and class.

And, well, as someone who’s played White Wolf games, I’m telling you that it’s not cool to have Social Combat when Social Combat is just the normal combat, but clunkier, with the serial numbers filed off, and your ability to win hobbled by the amount of “damage” you can do arbitrarily limited. It’s not cool to have your Morality put on a 1 to 10 scale, and be forced to let a die roll determine whether you become an objectively more immoral person when you shoot a Yellow Bastard before he can have his way with an eight year old girl. It’s not cool to have put a number into one of four stats because character creation compels you to do so, and then be constrained by rules that force you to roll some more dice for the privilege of having your character act as you want him/her to based on which stat you chose under circumstances that will come up because the system is designed to turn control of your character over to the ST unless the ST deliberately decides to omit those rules. It’s not cool to have Super-Charisma and make it so that anyone with it can tell someone to kill themselves and have it happen if the victim doesn’t have equal or greater Super-Charisma. It’s not cool to be told by the book that I’m scum of the earth for wanting to disarm my opponent so that I *GASP* have an advantage over him/her in combat and that if I try it the ST is honour-bound to disallow disarming FOREVER.

I’ll take my “video games” anyday.

Why do we buy products? We are creative souls by nature. We could make up some rules. We could create worlds. But when it comes to combat, a balanced system is difficult.

We buy products to give us a uniform rulescape for the aspects of the game that most needs a unified, tested, well-designed and agreed upon rulescape.

Combat is the easiest place to screw up balance and make House Rules or broken changes that steal the thunder of other players. So combat is what most needs a third-party guiding hand.. the rules.

Thus it is perfectly logical that 4e focuses on combat rulewise, since that is where balance is needed. The rest of the game, the DM is capable of.

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I appreciate the comments. Of course, everything I type is opinion and everyone is going to see it a different way. I really do like reading different points of view.

kaeosdad´s last blog post..kaeosdad favorited Autumn Frontiers

Although I’ll admit, having more fluff content is always a plus. I’ve been digging some of the setting neutral stuff that has been coming out as a result of the 4e GSL.

kaeosdad´s last blog post..kaeosdad favorited Autumn Frontiers

I don’t mean this to come off as a flame. It’s just that the argument that there is no way to be imaginative using powers really doesn’t make sense to me.

D&D started out as a wargame. From the beginning it was always geared towards combat. The mechanics, in my opinion really should favor combat and balance especially in a game where if everyone is having fun, then everyone wins. Role playing is what you make of it. I mean, it’s all just fluff.

kaeosdad´s last blog post..kaeosdad favorited Autumn Frontiers

I’m lucky that my group is more open-minded than most. My current 4e campaign is trying to out-gritty the Iron Heroes game, and with help from my players (one of whom is the IH DM), it’s succeeding.

As for combat, I understand combats can be made cinematic, but not all of our combats have been in the exact same terrain with the exact same enemies. Some have been in caverns, some on stairs with 100′ foot falls against enemies with weapons that can push you over the edge, some have been out in the open in forested environments. It really doesn’t seem to matter.

One thing, perhaps, is that the enemies seem to stick around longer, thereby lengthening the combats. Maybe cutting the HP in half will help.

As for making combat cinematic, I have to disagree with you on almost every point. 4e combats, in fact, encourage extremely imaginative tactics, skill usage, and power implementation. The thinking of how to set up a combat in 4e requires a different frame of mind from the DM, however, which I think is where this assessment comes from (and you\’re not alone in this).

If the DM makes each encounter interesting and dynamic then that opens up a ton of options for what the PCs can do and how they can do it.

If the DM makes the environment different and interesting in each combat, plus the powers that the PCs bring to the fight are different, plus the monsters are different and react differently, plus there might be something else nearby that reacts in a different way…with all these variables and some creative set up work by the DM it seems nearly impossible for things to happen exactly the same in ANY combat, let alone every combat.

While that power that pushes the enemy might be cool in combat A because it pushes the baddie into the acid pit, in combat B it might be used to keep them away from the magical gem for one more round, and in combat C it\’s simply used to keep them away from the wizard so he can cast his area/ranged spells safely.

I would say if anything 4e REQUIRES more imaginative combats and if you don\’t put that level of creativity into the process then you end up with the \”exactly the same in each combat\” problem.

Although in the end, I\’m still not sure how being reduced to two or three powers that works the same in every combat is less imaginative than the hit-it-with-my-sword-again one power option that previous editions provided for every non-spellcasting class.

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@kaeosdad- It’s hard to be cinematic when every combat is basically the same. All the powers work exactly the same in each combat. There’s no way to be imaginative, really. At least in earlier editions of D&D, you didn’t have your combat options so explicitly spelled out for you, allowing you to use more of your imagination in combat.