Quote from: Buceph;341624I suppose in a way I'm looking for some affirmation that it doesn't have to be played in the way I've encountered it so far. But also, seeing as you can play pretty much any RPG in pretty much any style, if it is actually designed to be played in a way that isn't hack and slash, and if this is evident in the core rules, or sourcebooks. And if so, can you point me to a good setting book.

I'm still trying to figure out why you want to play D&D.

Regards,
David R

D&D (all editions) is a game about fantasy adventurers in (some flavor of ) world of monsters and treasure, and there is necessarily going to be some hacking and slashing involved.

Specifically about 4e: Consider that the action movie and the martial arts movie represent a genre where the details of the action and fight sequences are just as important as the outcomes. You could certainly have a dramatic movie that tells the exact same story as Enter the Dragon or Transformers or the Matrix without the fight sequences. 4E makes the fight sequences the focus, rather than the drama.

(As an example: Dark City and the Matrix tell almost the exact same story. But Dark City is a mystery and the Matrix is an action movie.)

Quote from: David R;341722I'm still trying to figure out why you want to play D&D.

Regards,
David R

I suppose there's a couple of reasons. A big one is that I've never really looked at D&D. I've played a few five week campaigns/once offs but never really got into the system.  Which sort of ties into the fact that it's such a monolith of gaming I want to be able to see why and what it actually does. If it's true that there's millions of players around the world, and there have been even greater millions then there must be something to it, I thought I'd give it a chance.

Another reason is that my gaming group generally despises it. They don't like generic hack and slash and I, with my rebellious ways, want to usurp that. Especially given that they proclaim that they don't like dungeon crawls but they've been spending 75% of their time in combat for a good few sessions. And it's in Savage worlds, which I don't think is very suited to a dungeon crawl. I think that I could kind of give them a "haha fuck you" by presenting a dungeon crawling game, and let them decide whether they want hack and slash or whether they want their professed game of politicing and intrigue.

Finally, it's how I write my games. I won't get a brilliant idea and implement it into the game of my choice. Instead I'll read the setting and get sparks from little details in the fluff. This means that the more background material that's someway decent, the better it is for me. Traveller is my current bent and I'm having a great time with the Gurps stuff, in addition to the Mongoose stuff. With D&D's size there must be a huge amount of material that I can riff off, more so than a lot of other systems. But not in a way that I get bogged down in canon. More that there is simply plenty of story to be mined from the books.

So really, it's part challenge and part curiousity. I feel there's something missing from my gamer credentials when I can't reel off the D&D skills and stats.

Quote from: J Arcane;341663As I've said from the early days of the design run up, 4e is essentially designed to be the game that D&D's detractors have always claimed it was.

Yes, that's absolutely true.

However, I will add something else: in the course of time since 4e's release, I've seen some evidence that DESPITE this, some players have managed to turn their 4e campaigns into games rich on roleplay (mainly by ignoring some of the rules which actively try to stop the game being anything but "gamist").

It just goes to show the indomitable spirit of the regular gamer against the face of Swinery.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;341751Consider that the action movie and the martial arts movie represent a genre where the details of the action and fight sequences are just as important as the outcomes. You could certainly have a dramatic movie that tells the exact same story as Enter the Dragon or Transformers or the Matrix without the fight sequences.

A (hopefully) interesting digression:

Shortly after The Matrix came out in 1999, I was at a party talking with a group of Chinese engineering and architectural graduates.  They were all thrilled to see an American film that so successfully captured the essence (if not all of the specific details) of Taoist thought.  Every one of them, though, expressed their disappointment in the level of violence, which they felt it would have been better without.

!i!

Quote from: Ian Absentia;341770A (hopefully) interesting digression:

Shortly after The Matrix came out in 1999, I was at a party talking with a group of Chinese engineering and architectural graduates.  They were all thrilled to see an American film that so successfully captured the essence (if not all of the specific details) of Taoist thought.  Every one of them, though, expressed their disappointment in the level of violence, which they felt it would have been better without.

!i!

Well, they should have watched Dark City! Actually the philosophy element was probably missing from that movie too. But the storyline is very similar:

"...a man wakes up and eventually discovers his entire version of reality is just a virtual version cobbled together by mysterious captors (who appear human but actually turn out to be giant space spiders in this version). He eventually pieces together the clues that allow him to discover and then master the virtual environment and uses it against the captors, thus being liberated from the illusionary world".  

The sets are amazing, and Sarah Connely (not really, it's another singer) sings Sway and the Night has a Thousand Eyes in a nightclub, making it well worth the effort.

Dark City came out a year before the Matrix, but I think Matrix is probably the stronger film.

EDIT:

Scene by scene comparison in Spanish, but with pictures.
http://galeon.hispavista.com/cinerama/actu2/matrixdarkcity.htm

I just read through the 4th Ed Player's Handbook and I can see why anyone would presume D&D is just for hack n' slash. There was nothing that indicated that the players could do more than fight monsters. There was just plug in power after plug in power. Although I skipped most of the actual powers I took a look at a lot of the utility ones expecting that's where the non-combat help would come, but it just seems to be setting the players up for more engagements.

Surely fantasy worlds can be as rich a setting as any other Sci-Fi or 1920's or anything else. This places can have as much human drama (and alien drama) with culture clash and societal differences as any other realm. What fantasy series should I be looking at for this kind of set up.

Well, I find your reasons for choosing D&D a bit....well...exotic. But who knows the kind of interesting game play it may inspire.

Quote from: Buceph;341828What fantasy series should I be looking at for this kind of set up.

Well, for the stuff you mentioned, SkyRealms of Jorune, of course. Or Earthdawn. Both not D&D settings. For that, there's Dark Sun or maybe Planescape. Others who are more hip to D&D will come up with something better.

QuoteAM wrote:
Well, they should have watched Dark City! Actually the philosophy element was probably missing from that movie too.

Actually the film was drenched with that element(s) and except for the ending - which was lame, IMO -I think the film was a strange brew of Eastern and Western philosophical and religious agita. As to the level of violence in the Matrix, it was more of a genre justifying trope, than anything else. It would have seemed less of an intrusion, if the narrative was a little more complex.

Regards,
David R

D&D's main "pro"-hack&slash element is the way character's gain XP, in virtually all editions its main focus is on combat. In some, that's the only meaningful way to gain XP, in others its that and treasure, in Basic D&D, treasure is even more important than combat.

That's easy to get rid of, though, if you just decide that accomplishing different tasks gives you XP, those tasks can basically be anything.

So I don't know that D&D would be the indicated game for a game with NO combat or adventuring, but it can DEFINITELY be played for a game that is not mainly focused on those things, and is instead focused on politics, or a travel-log, or a mercantile campaign.
I know, because I've run all of those with D&D.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;341778Dark City came out a year before the Matrix, but I think Matrix is probably the stronger film.

Heresy!

Quote from: jibbajibba;341720That is quite interesting I learnt D&D at about the same time and self taught but I bought 1 adventure and thought it was crap and based all my games on the fantasy novels and mythology I read. The effect of this meant we stopped dungeon delving adventures in about 81 and were trying to run City games that replicated the grey mouser or epic quests that mimiced LotR and later the Belgariad. Then there was that spate of early 80s Sword and Sorcery movies the best of course was Conan but you also had Beastmaster, Hawk the Slayer, etc etc and these kind of set our adventuring standard

Same here. I ran "Keep on the Borderlands" and a couple other modules, albeit heavily adapted to the style of play we enjoyed, but 95% of my AD&D experience was self-designed modules centered around mythic themes from my interest in Greek mythology at the time, as well as my obsession for Howard, Tolkien, Eddings, Leiber and Piers Anthony's Xanth (gah...loved them so much in high school, can't read Anthony anymore as a result).

I've always been fortunate (?) that the gamers around me enjoyed the same style of epic story and world-driven play, and that dungeons were just "something that pops up as a story element" in to which one occasionally delves, usually to find the big baddie who's been terrorizing the nearby city or such, rather than the whole point of the game. So I had a really, really skewed perception of how AD&D was meant to be played, apparently....and so has everyone I've ever played with, ironically. I don't really know anyone who played D&D just for the dungeon crawling, oddly. Until recently, that is, in the 3.X era.

Quote from: camazotz;342124Same here. I ran "Keep on the Borderlands" and a couple other modules, albeit heavily adapted to the style of play we enjoyed, but 95% of my AD&D experience was self-designed modules centered around mythic themes from my interest in Greek mythology at the time, as well as my obsession for Howard, Tolkien, Eddings, Leiber and Piers Anthony's Xanth (gah...loved them so much in high school, can't read Anthony anymore as a result).

I've always been fortunate (?) that the gamers around me enjoyed the same style of epic story and world-driven play, and that dungeons were just "something that pops up as a story element" in to which one occasionally delves, usually to find the big baddie who's been terrorizing the nearby city or such, rather than the whole point of the game. So I had a really, really skewed perception of how AD&D was meant to be played, apparently....and so has everyone I've ever played with, ironically. I don't really know anyone who played D&D just for the dungeon crawling, oddly. Until recently, that is, in the 3.X era.

I've had the same experience.

I kind of left tactical wargaming to play early-ish D&D, where a typical combat took maybe twenty minutes before the roleplaying went back on. Eventually reached the stage where it seemed like mainstream RPG systems were taking me back to tactical wargaming. Became easier to get a lighter system and build it up than to edit (and debate) my way back to roleplaying.