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Written by Daniel Schorr
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Wednesday, 27 August 2008 07:41 |
When I first started roleplaying 25 years ago it was all about story. I was hooked on the idea of being a character in a fantasy story that would unfold before me. The story was crafted by the players under the guidance of the DM. My friends and I would sit around and tell stories of our characters, what they were doing and how they were doing it. Sure we wanted to kill the monster and loot its treasure, but it had little to do with the tactics of combat. The concept of a combat focused game wasn't even in our heads. My father was a historical wargammer, so I knew what miniature games were about and D&D wasn't a miniatures game. It was all in the imagination.
Fast forward to 2004. I took a break from gaming for about 5 years, when I returned, D&D had changed into something new. It was heavily mechanized. Everything had a rule. Combat was shown on a battlemap and the cool miniatures we had been using years ago to give visualization of our character was now an essential part of the game. It was new. It was fun. It was a combat game.
D&D 3.x took gaming out of the imagination and onto the tabletop. I didn't just shoot my bow at the monster. I strategically placed my miniature in a position that granted me the best possible modifiers to hit the target. It definitely appealed to me. I had grown up on this sort of thing, watching my father play war games as a kid. I loved it. It was like a board game where you created the pieces and challenged the monsters to a game of strategy. To me D&D had become a game of character building and rules knowledge. Those who understood the game could make the most powerful character (whatever imagined) and win most every encounter.
I still roleplayed my character. He had dreams and ambitions and personality, whether it was my Gnome Cleric of Water or my Halfling Paladin or my Arabic Archer, they all had character. But what seemed to me missing from almost all my games, even those I ran, was a sense of story and imagination. How did my character or the players’ characters fit into the world. There didn't seem to be much left to the imagination. I knew my character from what I had seen him do on the gaming table. The little miniature running around the room shooting arrows or casting spells. He had personality but very little else. Where was my character’s story? What was left to imagine?
Enter 2008 and D&D 4.0. I think it was reading the PHB, DMG, and MM that made me realize what I was missing in my D&D experience. From a player standpoint all the cool abilities are almost entirely focused around the table top and not in the imagination. This isn’t to say that 3.x didn’t have the same feel, but there’s something more about 4.0 that makes me miss my imagination. Is it really possible to lose the grid in either 3.x or 4.0 and enter into pure imagination? I don’t know.
In 4.0 as a player I feel that I'm missing a since of control over my character’s destiny. I miss the idea of my character being able to save against spells or avoid the nasty trap. I want my character to be dynamic not simply stand there and take it. I want him to jump out of the way instead of standing there getting hit. The loss of saving throws (in the traditional sense) from 4.0 removed the last bastion of story from the combat encounter. Some may argue that 4.0 creates an opportunity for more story, since the combat isn’t as bogged down with sometimes difficult rules, but as long as there’s a battle map sitting there, it’s hard to say that there’s any story at all. And that’s not a criticism, simply an observation. I miss the story.
Now this post isn't an attack on 4.0 since 3.x did the same thing. It's an observation of how gaming has moved from story to roleplaying to encounters. I think the first signs of this came when XP was removed from finding treasure. It was often the case where you could get more XP by stealing the dragon's treasure than by killing the dragon. Players always had a choice. Some of my favorite encounters have always been those that involved planning how to defeat the encounter with the least amount of risk possible. I really enjoy that aspect of the game, in any edition.
But I digress. I guess my question to the gaming community is this . . . can you have a story rich game that still relies on the use of miniatures and battle maps? Does the imagination suffer by the use of gimmicks and toys? Do you notice a loss of story in 3.x and 4.0? For those of you that play other RPGs that don’t rely on miniatures do you notice more story elements in those games?
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there is a difference between Roleplaying, Rollplaying, and Storytelling. Most of the discussion on various forums and blogs is between Roleplaying and Rollplaying. It seems that people forget the idea of Storytelling. |
