Well, would you look at that? Not even two weeks, and already a new post? Anyway... I feel ready to write Part 2, but I want to clarify some things first. There are certain things that I've been hoping for in Dungeons & Dragons 4.0, and my very personal and objective take on the rules will mirror those expectations. I think it is only fair to talk about those expectations before I start the rules review.
A simile to put things in perspective: I think that if you're a hardcore fan of drama and go and watch an action movie, you should not give it a 1/10 overall rating (overall rating being what most sites track) just because it did not appeal to you. Let's be fair: people don't go and watch Die Hard because they want drama. You're in the wrong theater. I think there's something petty and perhaps downright dishonest in publicly dissing a movie because it belongs to a genre that you personally do not care for. If you want to say friends of drama everywhere, beware! 1/10 drama rating on Die Hard, do not watch!
by all means go ahead, but make sure it's clear for whom your rating is intended, because the typical watcher will probably not care about your 1/10 drama rating for Die Hard, as long as it has an 8+/10 action rating. In order for the overall rating for a movie to actually have any effective meaning, it should reflect how well the movie does in its designated genres, so drama fans should stay away from affecting the overall rating for Die Hard.
In other words, if you want something else from D&D 4.0 than I do, don't pay attention to the parts that aren't important to you. This is a quick list of what I would have wanted from D&D 4.0:
- Fun
- Roleplaying
- Immersion
- Realism
- Reasonable pace
- Simple and effective rules
Fun
Dungeons & Dragons is a game. As a game, it is my personal opinion that it should also be fun. However, tastes differ and fun means different things to different people. I personally find Chess to be interesting, but not fun. Additionally complicating matters, what some people consider fun
may not be at all compatible with what others may consider fun.
The trick is making something fun for all participants.
Roleplaying
Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 is a roleplaying game. It says so right there on the books' covers. The meaning of roleplaying is also somewhat different for different people. On a rather abstract level, Chess is a roleplaying
game because you take on the role
of a general moving his units around on the field of battle. Or something like that. If you make it abstract enough, everything you do involves playing a role. This is obviously too generic to be a useful definition.
A friend once asked me what roleplaying meant, and apart from the usual stuff about taking control of a character in a made-up environment, I said that you haven't really roleplayed until you've had your character make a move that you know is suboptimal but do it anyway because that is what your character would do. The party wizard knew that he had to blast the villain there and then, and end it all to save his party, but chose to use his spell to kill the underling that murdered his mentor instead.
It's a bit too strong a requirement, though, so let's say that roleplaying is at least considering having your character do the suboptimal move, because the character would also considering doing it.
Roleplaying does not end there, of course. Roleplaying is about making the stats on the paper coming truly alive. You don't roleplay in the computer game Diablo; despite its fantasy trappings, it does not provide a framework for roleplaying, only for playing. Ultimately, roleplaying is not truly dependent on a framework but rather on the players, but the framework can and does do a lot to either encourage or discourage roleplaying.
Immersion
Once we are roleplaying, we can move on to immersion. Immersion is about forgetting that you are playing a game. This is not limited to roleplaying games, of course, but it should be particularly true for them.
Realism
(I choose to use the word realism
here, rather than the more cumbersome believability,
in part because that's the term used in the DMG.)
When it comes to RPGs, realism is a requirement for immersion. Nitpickers will no doubt point out that in reality, you're a guy pretending to be an elf in one of your friends' basement. Such things is hardly relevant to game realism. Realism is not dependent on real life; it only shares a common foundation. Realism is about the fact that once you're pushed off the cliff's edge, you fall--assuming a high cliff, probably to your death--unless you got some means to save yourself. Realism is about having reasonable means and methods do do something, not about the particulars. In real life, a parachute might save you in real life. In the game, it is just as realistic to use a Feather Fall spell to save yourself. A game with good realism may bend the rules of real life reality but does not break them entirely, so flapping your arms will not allow you to fly, for instance.
Another important aspect of realism is choices, actions and reactions. Fire burns you and gravity causes you to fall, but those are static aspects of realism. The actions of characters, NPCs and monsters should also make sense (see roleplaying, above). A druid that attacks you one round and heals you the other, or a CN character that rolls a die to see what he does this round, is jarring to a sense of realism.
Reasonable Pace
Not much to say about this one. In short, I don't want to be start and end this week's 3-4 hour session with the same encounter. Obviously, some things can take longer than ten minutes to accomplish, such as the twenty-trap combo corridor, and it's only fair that they do. But on the other hand, I don't want something that should be a simple thing to cause us to be bogged down for several hours. Combats are one of these things. Seriously, if there are ten rounds to a minute and a combat lasts four rounds, why do we have to spend several hours getting through 24 seconds of in-game time?
Simple and Effective Rules
This is pretty much a requirement for a reasonable pace and should of course apply universally, but there are some cases where this applies particularly much. Grapple in 3.x comes unbidden to mind. This is just as much about representation as actual rules: The grapple rules contained a fairly complex subset of the 3.x rules, but a lot of the problem with grappling was due to it being poorly and confusingly written.
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