At some point the focus of Dungeons and Dragons changed. I can remember when I played with my friends over lunch with nothing in front of us except character sheets and a pencil. No battle mat. No dry-erase markers. No one inch figurines. We probably had some rulebooks lying around, but they were rarely consulted. An optimized build was something we never even considered. The most min-maxing we did was taking a bastard-sword instead of a regular long sword for its increase in damage (and its hilarious name).
Since the advent of 3E and now into 4E the game has changed for me in a fundamental way. Instead of a role-playing game where the focus is on the characters and their actions, the game has become a tactical game – more reminiscent of a table-top war game. Building your character can feel more like allocating your points for the greatest tactical advantage than developing a new person. What happened?
The Tactical Pendulum
Somewhere along the line combat became the focus of Dungeons and Dragons. This of course was always true, in the background – but we’ve gone ahead and admitted it, blessed it, and canonized it with the newest incarnations of the rules. The pendulum has swung slowly but steadily toward the tactical enjoyment of gaming and away from the immersion enjoyment of the hobby. I know some people who would get more upset with a fellow player who purposefully selected non-optimal actions during combat for role-playing reasons than a player who spends 10 minutes each turn determining the proper actions. Even skill challenges, as much as we appreciate those tasty bread crumbs that show the game is more than just a series of combats, are designed with a mathematical underpinning that assumes, necessarily, that non-combat goals will be approached with the same tactical persistence.
The vocabulary of the game bears this out. How often do you hear “I use Diplomacy to convince the guard to let me in,” or “I use Perception to search the lake.” In skill challenges the GM will inevitably field questions like “Can I use intimidate instead of bluff to convince the solider I’m really in charge?” Why? Because they have a +10 to intimidate and only a +8 to bluff. Aiding another has no immersion either. It’s simply an easy way to get a major statistical advantage. It makes complete sense and is a tactical mistake to avoid.
Paladin: “I use my Religion skill to see if I know anything about this strange symbol on alter…”
Wizard: “I have some religion knowledge, I’ll aid.”
Paladin: “Anyone else?” *crickets* “Come on, we should all try!”
Rogue: “But Rassa doesn’t know anything about religious symbols.”
Paladin: “So what? You might as well try. It can’t hurt.”
Rogue: “Ok…” *rolls a 12* “Nice, you get an extra +2 from Rassa.”
Paladin: “That’s a +8 for my skill, and an extra +4 so far, who else is going to aid?”
Is this a Problem?
I like playing tactical games as much as the next person. Really. I enjoy them so much that when I get ready to play this so-called Role-Playing Game I often can’t help myself from min-maxing. I get into combat and get my power cards ready. I’ll send my wizard in first because I can soak the damage from a few hits then teleport to the back lines. I’ll proclaim to everyone that I use “Fire Shroud” and that I’m saving my Daily for an action point when I get a +3 for Human Action Surge. I’m glad I pumped an 18 for my INT and an 18 for my WIS so that my Orb of Imposition Sleep spell is at +4 to hit and -4 to the enemy save. The ability itself already has a description of what it looks like, so I can simply read it off the card instead of imagining it.
Is this fun? Yes.
But I miss role-playing games.
Role-Playing Made Difficult
I have slowly but surely changed my expectations of what Dungeons and Dragons feels like. The joy used to be the wildly free range of actions you could have at any time and the immersion that choice allowed. It is now far more rewarding for its tactical feel and it’s brilliant play balance – even if the rules create a situation where you’re trying to find the best way to use your move, minor, standard, and potentially action point actions each round.
A fan of 4E might point out that there is nothing in the rules that says you can’t role-play. In fact, I am that fan of 4E! But it has, I think, become more difficult. Would you select for your character a feat which let your eyes glow red when you’re angry and gives you a +1 bonus to Intimidate checks? Or would you select a Skill Focus in Intimidate? Is this even a difficult choice? Are you or your fellow players willing to make sub-optimal builds, and I don’t mean a feat here or there, to make a character concept come alive? The balance and design of the game encourages you to make tactical choices rather than role-playing choices or else you will fall behind the curve.
But all is not lost. A well-balanced game with a chore mechanic should not stop you from enjoying what made the game so powerful in the first place. But it takes an effort to get that back, and the effort has to come from more than just one person. It can’t start and end with the GM. The players must be on board and think of the game as more of a story that they get to drive. Discussion in-game should be rules-light and action focused. Let the GM tell you what skill your action requires. You’ll have to stop worrying about the tactical ramifications of using weaker skills or making sub-optimal characters or forgetting to use that minor action. You’ll need to remember that failure can be as rich and entertaining as success. Sometimes more so.
How many of you would even really like to play this way?
Similar Posts:
- How to Design a Skill Challenge, Part 1: Theory of Choice
- From the Archives: Failure is an Option: When to use Skill Challenges.
- Failure is an Option: When to Use Skill Challenges.
At the age of eight JackOfHearts was invited to play Dungeons & Dragons during summer camp by kids that were much cooler than him. When he wasn't working on the family farm or practicing tennis, he spent much of his teen years reading fantasy novels and playing games of the role playing, collectible card, tabletop, and video varieties. He's now a nine-to-fiver who never forgot the joy of descending into a tomb for forgotten treasures. 
The problem with the flavor feat example is that nothing is stopping Skill Focus: Intimidate from being described as “my eyes are red and scary”.
Skill Focus has no flavor. It could mean absolutely anything, as long as it still gives a +3 bonus to a skill.
Unless the example group shown in this article are really anal semantics lawyers. I doubt it. They seem like people who are having fun and would probably think “skill focus made my eyes glow red” is absolutely cool. Try introducing this idea to them.
A lot of this problem is player and DM mentality.
Agree, but feel that we’re a the beginning of the backswing on that pendulum, which got aorta out of hand with 3.5. For me, 4e represents an attempt to divorce the minmaxing from the roleplay. They haven’t quite gone as far as something like gurps, with two, comparable combate systems, one tactical, one not. I think the trouble there is opportunity attacks and shifting are fun, and how to abstract the combat without nerfin those abilities (manuever checks?). The reduced skill list, lack of non-combat related feats, the split of magic into powers and rituals, and encounters and skill challenges are for me closer to the old way of doing things (compare PHII’s backgrounds with secondary skills from 1e or 2e). All that’s missing is a basic combat system option (though that might hurt mini & tile sales)
That’s certainly true. You could re-flavor Skill Focus to have role-play ramifications. I’m a full proponent of that and I bet most players are too.
What I was really trying to illustrate though is the question of choice between tackling the game as a tactical one or as a role-playing game. Because of the current design I think many people are encouraged to try to win the numbers game and forget that the game has a lot more to offer.
I agree completely that it’s a problem of player and GM mentality and that’s why I think it is worth some discussion.
Whatever you say. We’ve played far more tactical games of AD&D1e than our usual game of 3.x. Of course, I’m in a group that doesn’t use miniatures and never has except as an experiment.
I also happen to play in and run a B/X D&D campaign. The B/X campaign I’m playing in definitely falls into “heavy tactical gaming / light wargaming” quite often, whereas the one I run does so significantly less often. Our last 3.x campaign was never as tactically heavy over the 18 levels of play as the B/X campaign I’m playing in now.
Suboptimal in 4e? Yes.
My kid made a Dragonborn wizard that thinks he is an elf.
I made an Eladrin cleric that charges into battle cause the durn dragon born does first… then pays for it.
Oh, I forgot to add, those are our RPGA characters.
@Exedore6: I agree mostly, but disagree with you on skill challenges. They formalized running non-combat challenges with a statistical model for successes over failures which tends to encourage math thinking instead of creative thinking even if it doesn’t have to. It is certainly still possible to run and completely enjoy a skill challenge, but the formalization of it isn’t a swing away from tactical gaming.
@Dyson: I’m not sure how we would play 4e without a battle grid and tokens. You’d either have far better processing power than I do or you’d have to be simplifying the game system. Sounds like either way, it works.
@Dar: Sounds like fun! Enjoy it!
On my end, 4e hasn’t done anything but smooth out the combat bits of the game –the players who are used to the system really flow with it– and formalize/structure RP bits to help more introverted people get into the RP more. In a lot of ways 4e allows more free-form RPing than previous editions.
I agree with wyatt when he says that you can easily “skin” anything you want. It’s easy to feel constrained by powers and the battlemat, but if you look a step beyond it, you can see that those features free you up to do whatever you want.
I’m running two games now. One is a standard high-fantasy game that’s starting to go heavy on the intrigue and politics in the paragon tier, and another has the PCs working as archaelogists in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. 4e has worked wonderfully for those games, and both often see no use for the battlemat whatsoever.
When there is use for it, I do my best to keep it from being just a tactical exercise. Battlefields shift, monsters cajole the players, etc.
For roleplaying, I’ve always felt that less is more.
This is pretty relevant to my own most recent blog-post, where I’ve been struggling with my own (and my group’s) tendencies toward combat-heavy hack-and-slash. I feel a pretty big part of our group’s embracing of 4e (and we love love LOVE our more cinematic, tactically-challenging combats) is that the non-combat roleplaying has been, supposedly, freed up from a lot of 3e’s constraints but we have as yet not been able to switch our play-style away from being mechanics-focused.
I would love to get some tips on running combat encounters in 4e without the battle mat. I never used to use it but I feel stuck with it for even pretty simple encounters.
The battlemat seems like it’s here to stay (and, I think, it offers something to those who prefer the tactical game.) I believe we’ll get the most mileage out of encouraging role-play through emphasizing flavor over factors, as others have suggested here. That is going to require creativity and imagination, and starts with the GM. From there, good players will pick it up and eventually it will become the default “way to play”.
Otherwise the min-max style will win out, as it does in CRPGs, simply because players assume the point of the game is the level grind instead of the story.
This is an eternal point of contention with a friend of mine. He’s a min-maxer (he says “optimizer”), which he insists is necessary to have a fun game. I’m of the opinion that you don’t need to min-max to have fun, and indeed, one of my most fun (3.5e) games was with a party that most people would consider so unoptimized that it hurt: a melee ranger, an archer ranger, and a cleric. And the archer ranger absolutely refused to go into melee, EVER, for roleplay reasons, so that didn’t leave us with a lot of “staying power”. Nonetheless, we adapted, we survived, and we had a ton of fun doing it.
The tactical thing I’ve noticed with my recent first session of 4e. The emphasis on push and pull is interesting and very different. However, I agree, most people are set on maximizing everything, and the push on combat for D&D justifies this in a way. It’s always more fun to survive than not survive.
I myself have been thinking of trying a related-but-not-the-same system, like True20, or maybe just houseruling a total mish-mash of what I like from various games and seeing if I can create something fun without introducing major balance issues. 3.5 has its limitations, 4e I’m very skeptical about, and 2e was a bit too complex for me (although maybe I should go re-read it, it’s been a while).
Min-maxing and metagaming: the worst things to happen to RPGs.
You could min-max in the older games too.
I think it’s a player choice in how they approach the game.
My favorite character of late has been a dwarven rogue I built. He’s a fleshed out character with a cool story and features, but I also did choose cool powers and feats that would give some sort of edge in combat. He’s a very versatile character IMO and not short on role-play for it.
Combat has become more tactical to be sure, but I don’t believe it’s at the behest of role-play. I look at it as a blessing; for once the combat rules are pretty clear and deterministic. However, I haven’t really noticed if any of the publications discourage house-ruling or modifying the game to suite your group’s needs. In fact, I believe it’s generally encouraged if it will make the game more fun for your group.
The game really depends on the players. Rules are rules only in so far as you are willing to follow them. They are after all, made to be broken.