Last night I had my first encounter – pun intended – with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Last week I played another session of Call of Cthulhu. Reflecting on both, it struck me that my roleplaying tastes have definitely reversed from my earliest days.

Back then, playing a game which heavily lent on figures, maps, counting out range squares and throwing around spectacular powers and feats with abandon – while rolling very, very high modified numbers – would probably have thrilled me no end.

By contrast, playing a game which heavily lent on talking, investigating, puzzling, finding clues, trying to put those clues together, and sweating over Library Use checks did, in fact, bore me to tears.

Hence, D&D 4E is about twenty years too late for me; and I first played CoC twenty years too early.

This isn’t entirely a revelation. My gradual conversion to a more freeform, casual style of play which emphasises story and character over stats and carnage probably started 20-odd years ago; I just haven’t been in practice since then. Playing CoC for the first time in forever recently just reminded me of what I like. I really enjoyed the fact that we spent most of the game just talking, interacting in character, and poking the GM for more information. The gradual emergence of a story, indepedently forming from the actions of four people with the guidance of a fifth, is what roleplaying is all about – at least for me, these days.

While I was never a big ‘dungeon basher’ in my youth, I certainly enjoyed the constant dice rolling, miniature moving and stat-checking a lot more. Perhaps it helped my imagination, those rules that defined how the world worked. I still find enjoyment in it today – but more in a tactical, boardgame-like sense, than because it helps transport me to a fantasy world.

To be fair, I did enjoy last night’s game quite a bit, and it’s not right to compare it directly to my CoC experience. We were low on time, running pre-generated characters, and both players were strangers to each other. In that situation – not unlike a tournament game, I guess – it makes sense to focus on kicking in doors and killing monsters. In the end however, I probably could have had just as much fun playing an elaborate boardgame, or a miniatures skirmish game.

Having played it though, there’s now no doubt in my mind that D&D 4E is very definitely a miniatures-focused game, and would probably play badly without some form of tactical representation. While D&D’s original roots are in wargaming and miniatures, I’m still of the belief that your imagination will always trump a few painted figures, and if your discussion turns to things like “line of sight” then the magic has been diminished somehow. Sure, sometimes it really is important to know if the dragon can see you, but clear communication, plus perhaps a scribbled map, usually did the job for me. Now I can’t see many people trying to play D&D 4E without minis or square-overlaid maps.

D&D 4E is part of a carefully constructed product line which includes official miniatures, maps and a subscription-based character generation service. Interestingly, that seems aimed at both the older generation who have less time (and don’t mind paying for shiny stuff) and the younger generation who arguably have less experience in stretching their imaginations, having grown up with 3D gaming and photo-realistic CGI.

From one point of view that’s a damn smart business plan. For me though, it loses something fundamentally important about roleplaying. I’m not going to argue that one approach is ‘better’ than the other; like I said, I had fun playing both D&D 4E and CoC. Given the choice of which to play, however, and going forward into running my own games again, I know which style I’m going to pursue.