tneva82 said:
Fulminata said:
They developed the Skill Challenge rules to handle all of the above. There's a 23 page long chapter in the DMG titled "Noncombat Encounters." More than many games have had.
Gee. Roll X number of dice, get Y number of successes. What a great roleplaying. Or is that ROLLplaying :roll:
Ok, now go back and look at what I was responding to... it was a post complaining that XP was only rewarded for hack & slash. The Skill Challenge was specifically designed to allow non-combat situations to be integrated into the XP system. It's not the only one either.
Yes, the core of D&D is tactical combat. That's been true of the majority of RPGs since the invention of the genre, and has been especially true of D&D.
As for the skill challenge itself, yes it's possible to run it that way, and that would be wrong. The correct way would be to use die rolls to help adjudicate the outcomes of a roleplaying encounter (assuming the encounter is actually a roleplaying encounter, the same system can be used to adjudicate other non-combat encounters). Now for some, that screams rollplaying, but for others it's a recognition that your character is not you.
For example, the player may be someone who has a hard time stringing two coherent sentences together without stuttering over a lot 'um's and 'ah's and starting over twice before he finishes his thought, but his character is a skilled diplomat. On the other hand, the player might be an a skilled negotiator but his character a witless barbarian. In either case, it's not exactly fair to totally adjudicate an encounter based on the abilities of the players so a die roll is called for.
On the other hand, player creativity is also specifically mentioned as worth being rewarded.
In most ways this is the same thing that most other RPGs do, it's just that 4th edition does it in such a way that a completely inexperienced DM can string together a passable series of encounters using just the guidelines set out in the DMG. In order to accomplish that they had to get pretty mechanistic in some areas where other games just wave a hand and say "roleplay it." That doesn't mean that an experienced DM can't come in and say "just roleplay it" when appropriate.
It sounds to me like many of you just want to turn your nose up and sneer at 4th edition. I'm not sure if this is just because it's the big kid on the block, or what, but it doesn't deserve it. It especially doesn't deserve it in comparison to previous editions which had
most of the same weaknesses, in addition to weaknesses that 4th doesn't have.
There's only two criticisms I've seen of the overall game that I consider valid. The first is the link to the collectible line of miniatures. I could go on for a while with my problems with the way they are marketing their miniatures. The second is the argument that "it doesn't feel like D&D." I don't agree with that argument, but it's a subjective one, and I can see where many people might feel that way.
