Hear, hear!

I would like to point out a very good statement by a fellow old-schooler at Discourse and Dragons:

All I'm trying to say here is that the whole thing is a damn shame. It's my game too, and I really dislike what has been done to it and the shameless use of classic art recently to sell their lame excuse for D&D.

 Wizards has dropped the ball so goddamned bad that not even half of the community that was playing its 3rd edition have jumped ship. They've completely dropped production on games that are still selling, that still have interest in them in order to focus on their bizarre miniatures/roleplaying game that I really hesitate to call fantasy. They're flooding their own market with low-quality books, and promoting a dependant playstyle where they control everything about your game, from the settings to the "adventure paths" down to the damn rules. It's absolutely insane.

Like the quote above says, the game isn't D&D. This is not an opinion. There is almost nothing intact from old games save the very most superficial similarities. You roll a d20, and there are dwarves, elves, and halflings. There are fighters and clerics and paladins and wizards. And that's where the similarities end. There is absolutely no way you can convince anybody that it's the same game.

I can't place where I got the quote, but it was something about how "the guys who designed 3rd edition are good at rules design, but have no idea what fantasy is." And that's doubled for 4th edition. It's a very tight, rules-heavy system, and some people are into that. But I can't think of a single more boring game than one where your every action is defined either in terms of one of twelve hundred pre-defined combat powers or one of like five skill challenges.

Some people like it, sure. But it sure as hell isn't for me.

Allow me to rebut a post real quick that sums up the gist of the problems with these differing perspectives.

paladin in the citadel, you can't have it both ways. You're claiming that the degree to which a system encourages combat can be deduced from the amount of rules devoted to combat, and whether xp can be obtained from non-combat actions.

It is obvious that earlier editions of D&D had the most focus on combat in the rules. From within the rules as written, how can there be a focus on non-combat methods for getting treasure (for xp) if there are no rules for adjudicating stealth or social interaction? 

The answer, of course, is that the amount of such rules doesn't tell you how much a system encourages combat. By which measure, you can't say that 4e encourages combat.

Alternatively, you can drop your original claim. But you just look silly claiming that a wargame with some acting tacked on is somehow not primarily about combat.

Oh, and have you noticed this argument style of yours, "you disagree with me"="You don't understand the game" or "You are doing it wrong"? You might like to ask yourself how that is helping you make your points.

Firstly, we have a claim that earlier editions of D&D had the most focus on combat in the rules because the system didn't have a method for adjucating stealth or social skills. This reminds me of an enworld thread, where the original poster claimed that being dead didn't have any penalties. Hey, Sherlock, being dead means you're dead. You can't do anything, you're dead. If you need the rules to spell out for you what, exactly, happens when you're dead, then you're either being willfully ignorant, or you are a genuine idiot. And the same thing is here.

Do you know how to adjucate stealth? It isn't by having a pre-formed skill system where you roll dice and then say, "You managed to hide or something." Describe the area, and then let the dude decide where to hide at, and then you go from there. Similarly, with social skills. Your character doesn't have social stats because hey, guess what, you don't need them. You don't roll dice to decide if the dude believes you, you do something called "roleplaying."

Apparently, real roleplaying comes from having systems that do everything for you, so that you just roll dice and then your character does cool stuff. Apparently, roleplaying = rollplaying, to use a horrible phrase. Apparently, the more the game tells you how to play and what to roll in every situation, the more free you are and the better the system is.

But before I digress too heavily, let me point out that the fact that older editions of D&D don't tell you how to roleplay or to hide from things doesn't mean that 4e doesn't encourage combat. Or, to put it in simpler terms: These two things are unrelated.

Guess how you encourage behaviors. Protip: It's by rewarding people for your desired actions. The rewards you get in roleplaying games are experience and treasure. They both make your character stronger. In older editions, 80% of your experience was from treasure. 20% was from slain monsters. This means, in case your head is fuzzy and full of shit, that avoiding monsters and stealing their treasure when they weren't looking, or talking them into giving it to you, or distracting them and luring them away was the best way to get it. Which means that non-combat methods were the safest and easiest ways to get treasure, which is where the majority of your experience will come from. This is leaving aside the fact that treasure is its own inherent reward, of course.

Alternatively, in 4e, you get experience for killing dudes, and then a tinier amount for completing quests or using skill challenges. Other bloggers have detailed this better than I have, and I'll update my post when I figure out the url. But, essentially, you're rewarded for slaying as much as you can, and then you get a much smaller chunk from doing what the DM wants you to do and for rolling a series of dice how the DM directs you to. Sounds a lot like 4e encourages combat, since it's the primary way to gain experience.

And then of course, the obligatory, "It's not fair to tell me that just because I disagree with you, I'm wrong." In this case it is, since you're making claims while getting the facts wrong. Congratulations, you're wrong. Older editions of D&D actually encourage looting, not killing, and 4th edition encourages killing almost exclusively. You can't damn argue facts. This is not opinion.


Like I said above, there's nothing inherently wrong with liking a different style of play. I'm actually a pretty tolerant dude. But 4th edition encourages combat to the extent that it's nearly the only method of reward and older editions do not. We're talking rules as written here, not individual DM decisions, since I've heard of those DMs in older edition games who reward their players primarly for combat and for story and 4th edition DMs who only reward for completing quests. This is irrelevant, and on par with your decision that your version of Monopoly is better than mine because your group decides to give out $300 instead of $200 when you pass Go.

Miniatures Games

I know of a lot of people who defend 4th edition D&D by saying that it's a good tactical miniatures game, even though it masquerades as an actual pen and paper roleplaying game. Or, of course, they say that this version has just as much roleplaying in it as the other ones, or some such. We've already talked about why system matters and if we haven't, then maybe that's a topic for another day.

And honestly, if you like to play 4e as one enormous combat encounter after another, as I understand many do, that's perfectly fine. I've played Descent for hours at a time, after all, and it's perfectly fun. Speaking of which, let me plug for that real quick.

This ought to look familiar. It's a tactical miniatures game that has dungeon tiles, pre-defined treasure, and pre-defined characters with the option of creating your own via an elaborate system of points and balances. It has a mechanic for defining exactly how evil the Overlord (DM surrogate) can be to you, via a system of threat tokens and an Overlord deck containing threats and hazards like traps or a surprise spawn of monsters.

The boards are pre-defined, so you build it as the players come across it. They work together to clear the dungeon and grab treasure as fast as possible, so that the Overlord doesn't have a chance to summon hordes of monsters to wear the heroes down. Occasionally, the adventure will call for a big baddie, like a Demon, Giant, or Dragon, and those can take a couple of hits and some interesting tactical maneuvering for the players to overcome. There's even a campaign mode, in the form of a purchasable expansion. Its been described as a tabletop game of Diablo, taking two hours+ to go from scrublike beginning to demigod-like end. Played right, with a mind towards cutting time, it's a blast and a half, where everybody's running across the dungeon and strategizing and cooperating, but played with a bad Overlord, it's a boring, slow grindfest where you're cutting down enemies meaninglessly over the entire game.

The important point to note, in my opinion, is that except for the parts about threat, this game sounds exactly like 4e. Which is funny, because nobody tries to tell other people that Descent is still a roleplaying game, or that you can roleplay out the reactions of your hero to the new kobold or that the magic sword you picked up decides to talk to you. It's dungeon crawling reduced to its most basic form, that of: Kill the Monsters, Take Their Stuff, Kill More Monsters. It's literally all the rules deal with, and that's ok. And that's hard for some people to grasp!

Some people, again, will get upset when you tell them that their game isn't the same as games before it, or that their game is just a little battle simulation, but really, that's just fine. Just quit pretending that your game is the same as other games, and we'll be good. If you choose to play Monopoly, or Risk, don't try and tell people that it's the same game as Runequest or Shadowrun or hell, even GURPS. You're not playing the same game, or the same type of game. There's nothing wrong with your game. Really. You can have a game where the entire world is designed around combat balance and everybody has magic items that only work thrice a day and abilities that you can only cast once until you get in another encounter when you can cast it again, or a sword swing you can only use once a day because damn it, how did it go again? But if you're going to be playing a game where the mechanics in no way allow you to A) easily make up new ones or B) emulate any sort of literature, fiction, movie, or real world occurance, then you're not playing the same game as me.

AND THAT'S FINE. So quit getting butthurt when people tell you that "4e ain't D&D." It's not, and that's perfectly fucking fine. Neither is Descent, but you don't see its fans getting up in arms about it. Look at it this way, and this is the best way I can think of to describe it: You have a computer. You decide one day to build another computer, using almost entirely different parts but retaining the same rough style of the case. You then decide that your old computer is your new computer, because they're both in grey cases and both of them are in rectangular cases and both of them do roughly the same thing, so there's really no difference and you'd have to be some sort of zealot to think so.

Most people would call you crazy, right?