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[...] Apropos of Nothing ” Final Form Games [...]…

I found this site in France talking about Wildlife in Brittany: Golfe du Morbihan. Just wanted to share it with all of you……

I think we liked the wizard most because he required some of the most tactical thinking of anyone. His large dependence on area effect spells means that he usually gets at least one interesting choice per turn: Where to drop his AoE for the most damage/effect. This often leads to a secondary choice: Where to stand to enable the greatest tradeoff of safety vs. targets. (Especially since some of his spells are rather short range.)

Coincidentally, the flip side of this was why we found the bow-ranger fundamentally unsatisfying: Frequently his only real choice every turn was “who should I cause damage to?” He had far enough range that he could basically just pick a spot and sit there, and just choose who took damage every turn.

The thief, was also extremely satisfying to play, since he depended so much on setting up flanking situations. I think he actually made the game more fun for others as well, since he was ALWAYS interested in flanking with teammates, so he tended to encourage team maneuvers.

All of this though, I’ve just been speaking tactically. Treating the game like a board game. Your point is that you don’t have to do this, and can make the combats as epic or pedestrian in their descriptions as you like. I agree, but while the game doesn’t STOP you from role playing, it also doesn’t really seem to do a whole lot to encourage it, or make it easier/more interesting. (Certainly not when compared to games that have that as a bigger focus, such as Exalted or Spirit of the Century or what I’ve read about things like Dogs in the Vineyard or Polaris…)

I mean, you’re right. Nothing is stopping you from making awesome descriptions for all of your moves when you play D&D4e. Similarly, nothing is stopping you from making awesome descriptions every time you make a move in Monopoly, but people often just don’t bother, I suspect for similar reasons: The game doesn’t actively encourage it, so any motivation for doing so has to be internal, or it becomes just as easy not to bother. (We started trying to do descriptions, and they lasted about a session or so. Then they became increasingly intermittent as people just slowly stopped bothering. And the fact that they WERE bound in rules with no real option for back-and-forth meant that there were definite limits to the sorts of exchanges you could have unless you were willing to play fairly fast and loose with the rules.)

Personally though, my biggest beef with 4th Edition right now is actually none of the things you described: Just the simple lack of “real” choices when making the rules-supported aspects of your character. Most classes really only have 2-3 viable ways they can be put together, and it almost seems by design. (Rangers have to choose early on if they are bow-based or blade-based. Thieves if they are “brutes” or “dodgers”. Warlocks have to pick a “path”. Etc.) Every time new feats open up, you usually get to pick one out of maybe 3-4. At least one of those is frequently useless to you, since it is for the other “path” of your class. (ex: Bow attacks for a dual-blade ranger) so your real choices are more frequently between only 1-2 useful feats on a given level.

I suspect/hope that this will be fixed a bit as more books come out, but my fear is that new books will do less to expand the general pool as they will merely introduce new “optimal paths”. So rather than expanding ALL rangers, they’ll just give you a new “spear ranger” path, to go along the existing “bow” and “blades” rangers.

Oh well. It still makes a fun board game. And if you can coax good stories from it, more power to you. I feel like if that’s your focus though, there are better game systems.

-Montoli