Quote:
Originally Posted by cryptoknight
Roleplaying or not Roleplaying is a choice that those at the tables make. I've had characters that were nothing more than a piece of the battlefield, and I've had characters that have more RP in them than I've had in 1/2/3.5.
Any game system that returns Vancian magic is a poor one, seeing that go out the door was the best thing 4e did.
One thing I disliked about 4e was the simplified skills system (which has gotten even more simplified, not less which makes baby pandas sad).
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The problem is if you need 3-4 fights per evening so fights don't get unbalanced by powerful dailies, you have LESS time for RP. We usually play 2 fights per evening and LOADS of RP Scenes. In Heroic Tier this was fine, but in Paragon Level it did not work anymore... To have exciting fights so much gametime would be needed for the fights, that time was lacking for RP. In the end we ignored this and just had very easy fights, due to not having enough of them.
Also due to the way how encounters are balanced in 4e (the "MMO-y"/"chess-y" nature of it) even if the characters acted clever you cannot really reduce the number of enemies in an encounter- if you do so it will go trivial usually. So you either ignore the advantages the players "RP'ed out". Or you say "Well, you got rid of 3 of them - Okay, you kill the rest, we do not really need to play that anymore".
About Vancian Magic - it is sort of a mix in the latest playtest. You do HAVE to select a number of spells (1+spellevel for full casters), but you do not have to select in advance which spells you cast. You can cast ANY of the selected spells and then just cross off a spell slot of adequate level. It's sort of halfways a magic point system (with spell slots being your magic points ^^), halfways Vancian.
Skill system - I agree. Before 4e I played Midgard (a german Pen&Paper system, oldest Pen&Paper RPG in German Language) and there is a really VERY detailled skill system there. Anything D&D offers, be it Next, 4e, or any other edition, is inferior to that (but that game had other issues, mainly with highlevel play). But if I see a D&D (of any edition) skill system my first thought is always "Well. This is sort of primitive".