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I also very much love the RPGA; I'm a recent convert to RPGA-love having had very large misconceptions about it in the past
#1 - I have been told more than once at an RPGA game "Don't do much (or any) RPing or else we won't get this mod done in time." I have also witnessed more than one case of one player all but hating another player because of their RP.
"you mean you'd let the entire party die instead of letting them know that you're a sorcerer?"
"My character was raised in the Pale and is scared crazy about anyone finding out he's a sorcerer."
As for #2 - There are sometimes some options in the modules to do something else than just hack and slash, but they are either nearly impossible to do (okey, level 4 players, if you can hit a Diplomacy check of 40, you convince the monster not to attack you) or are investigative mods that more often than not the DM has to lead the players to find the clues needed to put everything together.
#3 I haven't experienced except for when a new player comes in unprepared and the lowest mod being played is APL 6. Although we often try to help them, if they're not familiar with the rules or something, the entire table will not complete the game because the new player came unprepared. But mostly I tell people what better way is there to make new friends than to go somewhere where everyone is doing what you're doing AND there are rules set up to help you get integrated into the group?
#4 is about half right for me as I have, again on more than one occasion, been the person who just sat in the back while the well equipped and specced characters simply mowed through everything for us. There was one ranger with scrolls that basically could have waded through the entire module without us. With the advent of 4e, I feel that the character "boringness" is heightened by the lack of customization and specialization of the character. However, some of the best PC's I've played with have to deal with the player's RPing of said characters - and had nothing to do with their stats. Now, if #1 stiffles such RPing, then this again becomes an issue. But I do tell people "what better way to see uniquness and variation in characters than to see many different people playing the same type of characters but in different ways?"
Though i agree to some level about much of what was said. At least as far as point #2 goes. As for #1 you do not want Players roleplaying in these modules.
I play with different groups of players but most groups are ROLEplaying groups. I recently ran Sense of Wonder with one of these groups. It introduced the players as random adventurers who had been teleported from random places (by the book entrance to this module) by a gnome cleric & then got into a bar brawl on his behalf.
It was all fun and games until after the fight & the roleplaying started. I could not convince my players that this gnome had an actual mission that was worth their time & that he wasn't completely off his little rocker. It took bribing them with a lunch break to get this game back to being rail roaded. Roleplaying is not always a good thing.
As for #3 & the cliqueishness of the players, this may be true where you are but as we have few conventions most of our games are open to the public & by invite (for those who showed an ability to roleplay in our open games). There is just not enough interest to be just "living" gamers, so we also have regularly run games (thats to say non-living).
due to our lack of conventions where i am, we don't have an cards. Or at least none of my players have any cards. I think the only thing any of us has is one of the GM's has the "fist of [insert name here]". It was some big glow in the dark dice that was an in game artifact.
4. RPGA characters are boring
Not in my game they are not. I don't break the rules but we do bend them a little for the benefit of fun. I try and make characters that are characters, even if i have to do things that would make optimizers cry. I have a tendency to make rounded characters, wasting feats in "Skill Training" for fighters & using panache for my Firesoul Genasi rogue, who i run as a swashbuckler.
So just remember, no matter how railroaded an adventure is the game itself is only going to be as fun as you let it be.
#2--I can't even really argue. As far as I'm concerned any 'canned adventure' is going to have far more emphasis on the combat aspects than the roleplaying, simply because it's far, far easier for a writer distant from the tables the game is ultimately played at to foresee and plan for a combat than it is to come up with material to cover every possible approach or idea the PCs might want to try out of combat, especially when you get out of a dungeon and into a city. The advantage of a home campaign is and always has been that you know your players better than some writer elsewhere, so you can better tailor what you want to run at any point to be interesting to them, you can create a skill challenge that will flat out fork the adventure path into two wildly different outcomes, and if it comes down to it, you can make up something for them to do that's still going to be entertaining and then go from there the next time you play. In a pre-written adventure, especially for a living campaign, it's expected that the PCs are going to take the job, and from there, everything not directly related to that becomes extraneous. The GM's allowed more leeway now, apparently (I never played pre-LFR campaigns) but that's going to take time to sink in, and with the 4-hour limit (which can be enforced in some cases simply by the venue or players schedules as well) sinks in it can be difficult to justify going too far off the beaten path.
Another element of this that contributes to both #1 and #2 is that in a home campaign, the DM should be taking cues from his players and the backgrounds they give their characters, and liberally seeding story hooks for each character to make everything that much more personal. Home campaigns let you tell a story about who your PCs are, Living campaigns are limited somewhat more into telling a story about what your PCs do. They are not the only heroes. They are not the chosen ones. They're adventurers out looking for a job in a big world with lots of other people just like them, and that's a different experience--and not necessarily in a bad way. I find it a nice change of pace.
#3--cliquish? RPG players? Well blow me down. This one's true. But it's not true of the RPGA, it's true of any group. We're in an insular little community and when we get a group that has that perfect dynamic, nobody wants to throw it off by bringing in a new player if they don't have to. It's a rare bunch of players who are willing to always have a rotating door running for new members. It disrupts narrative to have different people at the table every week, it makes it a bit harder to come up with things, and when the inevitable personality clashes happen it can lead to people just trying to find a more stable group. The piles of certs and tracking are a bit of a learning curve, sure, but it's not just the RPGA players exuding cliquishness--some of it is the very real reluctance of others to become involved in an open game.
(And good luck finding or getting into non-public games, for that matter!)
Adding to the frustration on this one--you have to sign up for an RPGA number before you can play. GM's out of signup cards? Game's a bit underway and you haven't got a character already made for the campaign standards? So sorry, come back next week. Not always, but often enough--again that's going to depend on the GM. I was more than happy to put a game on hold recently to allow a new member to sign up, and help him roll a character, and I didn't get even get a single complaint from the other players. But there are going to be times when that's not possible, and GMs who are more inclined to turn the new guy away from the table in progress. Moreso if there are already five or six players seated. A home game, sure, we'll run with seven, we'll run with eight, we'll run with three or two. It's not ideal but it can be done.
As for 4...
You've got a bunch of players who are often new to the game, running through an extended series of prewritten adventures, and their backgrounds, while interesting, are very, very rarely if ever going to be usable as story hooks for an adventure. They're often played in public locations or with strangers, so the levels of roleplaying might be toned down and the development of personality might not appear to the same extent as it would otherwise. It's also an environment where being less than fully optimized may get you shunned by others--though I guess it remains to be seen how much that holds true in 4e and LFR. There's going to be a distinct difference between the characters people roll up for public, Living games and what they use in a home campaign.
I'm not going to say that the misconceptions are incorrect, because on a surface level all are going to be true for a certain amount of games. The trouble is that to an outside observer the facts surrounding the reasons for those perceived inadequacies are not transparent, so instead of understanding that these public games just plain don't have the same expectations for a home game (but if you play well you may get invited to a home game where they DO demonstrate the opposite of the above), people will just get intimidated by it, or get turned away from a game in progress and not bother returning, or simply dismiss open games as not their thing. Underneath it all, we're generally open, friendly people who genuinely want new players and such, but there's a lot of other factors at work.
(And good luck finding or getting into non-public games, for that matter!)
Wow. I didn't know the rest of you had it so hard.
Seriously, i'm not being sarcastic (which is a pretty new experience for me). I supposed i just assumed.
I am part of a local group that used to be a gaming club, but was shut down due to people working sundays and gaming during the week instead. By since then our clubs message board stayed open & we use it to co-ordinate events, games & general get togethers for the entire city.
There's a big difference between good roleplaying and overdoing it. Some of the self-proclaimed "hardcore roleplayers" have a tendancy to get carried away and overdo their roleplaying.
I'm talking about the Prima Donna archetype in the DMG, you know, the drama queens who think that roleplaying involves several hours of talking about inane things like the weather or their clothes, or their family, or their relationships, etc. Basically, they sometimes confuse "roleplaying" with "sitting around gossiping".
I'm a narrativist/powergamer type, and these kinds of players drive me mad because they cause the plot to slow down to a crawl.
D&D is a roleplaying game. I do my best roleplaying while playing at the same time, e.g. a diplomacy skill challenge to get the other party to back down while fending off their attacks at the same time.
Character alignments must be unaligned, good, or lawful good.
Though my players after being run through a couple of modules believe it should read
Character can be of any alignment as long as its lawful good.
Honestly try playing a group of unaligned characters, characters who are not totally gun-ho about being heroic, or "ROLEPLAYERS" who want motivation for their characters and the whole thing has a tendency to fall apart.
5) The Alignment System section of Living Realms has been brought up by my players. It currently reads
Though my players after being run through a couple of modules believe it should read
Honestly try playing a group of unaligned characters, characters who are not totally gun-ho about being heroic, or "ROLEPLAYERS" who want motivation for their characters and the whole thing has a tendency to fall apart.
I haven't yet seen an LFR adventure that didn't at least include the promise of treasure or monetary reward as a possible hook. Even if your character is a cold-hearted mercenary barely capable of wearing that "Unaligned" badge, it's not exactly difficult to make that perfectly believable motivation.
Could you give us a specific example of what you mean?
I haven't yet seen an LFR adventure that didn't at least include the promise of treasure or monetary reward as a possible hook. Even if your character is a cold-hearted mercenary barely capable of wearing that "Unaligned" badge, it's not exactly difficult to make that perfectly believable motivation.
Could you give us a specific example of what you mean?
I have to agree here. I know the ones I've played haven't been at all difficult for Unaligned PCs to enjoy.
Unless, by 'Unaligned', the OP was referring to people playing characters as 'Unaligned '.
In 3e, it was referred to as Chaotic Neutral.
Joe
(1) It is is supposed to be a heroic game. You sit down at a table to play the adventure, so why create characters who are difficult to motivate to go on adventure? I mean, unaligned characters can be seeking glory, a challenge, and who knows what.
(2) Besides money and the need to be heroic it is very hard to come with plothooks that work for individual characters.
(3) The DM is free to adapt an adventure to fit the needs of his group. So why doesn't the DM talk beforehand with his players, trying to learn the motivations of the PCs and adapt the introduction to better fit their needs? Rememer: the adventure is not set in stone. Fun is more important and a DM can change adventures to fascilitate that fun.
(4) Taking 2 and 3 into account, why should the author bother thinking of dozens of potential plot-hooks which more likely than not are useless anyway.
For example, for the gnome one they could easily be under a geas due to his spell until they attempt to resolve it.
It's very frustrating to me when I'm in a group that's playing roleplay, but mainly just to mess around. My characters have motivations -- they tend to be good -- and when members of the party aren't taking their job seriously, it's hard for me to give a good in-character reason why my character wouldn't just ditch them.
That said, I can have a lot of fun moving miniatures around a map, too. ^^ So if I can't roleplay, eh, praise Avandra and pass the dice?
Nothing drives me crazier than a very boring dm that reads word for word out of every module and does everything straight out of the mod with out giving it some flare... People think that the module is a piece of law that has to be followed. I am happy to see the new mods encouraging the DMs to change the mod as they need to with the emphasis on making it FUN and Challenging for the players. If you have some role players at the table during skill checks give them a chance to role play through that part and give them a success if they do a good job and throw the dice into the garbage... Like I said its up to the DM and players to make the game fun. Communicate with the DM (in a respectful manner) and likewise vice versa. I have had the pleasure to play with some of the best GMs out there (some of the main writers of the Arcanis campaign) and its awesome to play almost any Living Campaign with them running the helm.