Comments on: Changing styles of roleplaying

By: Shadowe

Shadowe — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:33:03 +0000

I can see a lot of people agreeing, here. And I do, too.

I remember my longest-ever-running D&D campaign (so ingrained on my consciousness that my online persona, Chemlak, is named after a character I had in it), which was an AD&D 2nd Edition game. Combat was just a different kind of imagining, everything was described and all the pictures were in everyone’s head, and no doubt they were all different… but the game survived from 1991 to 1994, played at least weekly, and everyone got immersed in the adventures of this small group of characters. There were hatreds, arguments, marriages, deaths, and my group and I still reminisce about it now, 15 years later.

Not a miniature or square-gridded map in sight.

I find that the reliance on those props stifles the imagination of the players, by locking their understanding down in a tangible way, it removes some of the spontaneous “if I roll for X, can I try Y?”, because “if it’s not on the map, it’s not in the game”. A lot of the flow has gone.

This is not to say that mini-focused play is BAD. It certainly has its place, but it doesn’t suit me, really. I’d rather let combat flow from my lips to the minds of the players, without a lot of tactical thinking and manoeuvring… because every now and then it’s GREAT to have a player decide to quite literally pull the rug out from under the charging goblins – and I hate to remove that option just because I forgot to draw a rug on the map.

By: kelvingreen

kelvingreen — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:47:51 +0000

I’m glad you got into a game, as last night’s organisation was a bit all over the place! By contrast, the 4e game we played with RR was quite story-focused, although we did get the miniatures and battlemats out on a couple of occasions. Defenders of the game (which is not to say that I’m against it) do claim that there’s just as much room for roleplay in 4e as there was in previous versions, and that’s true to an extent, but I think it ignores the simple fact that combat in 4e is more intensive than previous versions. Yes, you can have lots of roleplay if you make room for it, but when combat does happen, you have to get out the figures, and the counters, and the maps; you can’t do without them in 4e like you could before, and I do think that can, sometimes, harm immersion.

By: Dr Toerag

Dr Toerag — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:46:36 +0000

I remember spending an entire session arguing “in character” about whose fault it was that our boat had sunk! We were all sitting on a rock surrounded by crashing breakers, with an enemy army on the shoreline ahead.
Our GM said that he had events planned, but he never had as much fun as just sitting there for several hours watching us bitch about our problems .

By: Crimson_Archer

Crimson_Archer — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:00:25 +0000

Yep, completely with you there. I’ve always been a ROLEplayer and loved the investigation and mystery games more than the hack & slash, but as you say, when I was at school I’d more happily spend my lunch hour slaughtering a cave full of goblins!