Setting out to Break D&D 4.0 - Instead it Breaks Me

It seems like the vast majority of gaming bloggers around are D&D players, so they constantly discuss the merits of D&D 4.0 and for some incomprehensible reason they seem to like it. Some might say D&D is an "acquired taste" but I think it's more like if you've only eaten gruel all your life when the makers of gruel brought out porridge you might need to take a few weeks to get used to the texture but now that everyone is eating porridge instead of gruel you've come to like it. Me on the other hand... I was eating home-grown vegtables since I was a toddler have been dining on roast beef for the past 3 years and now I'm feeding my very own cow fermented corn to create kobe beef... and for some reason everyone is going on about this new porridge called Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

Actually I'm wrong. Porridge is the wrong analogy for what D&D 4e is to me, it's actually pablum. Elements of real RPG pureed into a paste that can be fed to infants because they're incapable of chewing anything with substance. Lately among role-players there's been circulating an arguement that strong game mechanics are incompatable with strong narration. D&D 4e certainly does nothing to invalidate that arguement, that is if you believe that it has strong mechanics; I don't. What Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition does have is extensive mechanics, however these mechanics are entirely geared towards killing things with dice, everything else is an afterthought and a poorly realized one at that.

My distaste for D&D is no secret, I've been a staunch critic of it since Hasbro bought Wizards and they released D20. I vowed that I would not even accept a D20 product on my hard drive as a PDF even if it were given to me by a friend for free. (Yes illegal and irrelevant because I kept my vow all through 3rd edition.) However the industry seems to be coming back from the D20 OGL that afflicted it and I don't see the new one effecting it in the same way so I thought maybe it was time to bury the hatchet, after all; gaming is my favorite hobby and Dungeons and Dragons is the original from which all others have spawned. So I put aside my original distaste for the overall product and decided to give it a try and use and abuse it in ways that no one else really would.

I've not played many actual sessions of D&D truth be told, currently in my 13 years of gaming the count is up to 4 and a half (the half being made a character and did a 10 minute prelude but never actually played beyond that). But one session that I remember having some fun while simultaneously being annoyed at was a session where I got to play a 2nd level Bard in 3rd edition that was loaded up with skills. The scenario was that we had come upon a small town that was being terrorized by a necromancer (the cues being a dismayed populace and a really big graveyard) this of course was to lead to our group venturing through the sewers through hoards of skeletons raised from the ancestors of these poor townsfolk, smashing their bones to dust, killing the vile necromancer that animated them and then taking any grave goods that might have been collected in the process as our own.

I decided to take a different approach. I felt that it was obvious that the town council must be corrupt to let the people of this town be terrorized so, and that these people needed to be free from such tyranny. I describe carefully how I as a 2nd Level Bard would go to the neighboring monastery and explain to the Paladins there about how the council of this town was letting such a horrible thing occur. I requested that these paladins help me expel this corrupt council and help me with installing a more benevolent one, in exchange I would set up a tithe from the town taxes to send to the monastery as a protection fee, and probably end up being mayor in the process.

As a Bard I had the means to do this easily, my social skills were well up to the task because D&D didn't really have a way to counter good social skill rolls. So I was about to become mayor of this town get tax money for doing so as a 2nd level bard before the rest of the group had even decided which entrance to take into the sewers.

One of the players however was insistent that what I was doing could not be possible because I was only 2nd Level, and that was stuff that higher level characters did. The DM too was balking, not because he could find fault in my plan but that it would thoroughly derail the game which was barely even starting, so in good grace I acquiesced to their requests and went into the dungeon and fumbled around as bards are known to do, the next session I found other things to do that weren't D&D and that was fine with everyone. But the niggling thought remained with me long afterwards:

Can a well-played social character break the game?

I believed it could because Charisma is the only social ability and by-and-large considered a dump stat by D&D aficionados. Plus there were really no rules governing what a person swayed by force of personality would do.

There's a web-video circulating where during a game of D&D one of the PC's meets a girl. The conversation between the DM and the player goes like this:

PC: "Will she have sex with me?"

GM: "Um... roll your Charisma."

PC: *Rolls coming up 18* "Sweet!" *Then in a singsong voice of triumph declares:* "18-plus-four. That means I SCORE!"

Me... I've actually slept with women in real life, so I figure I can put together a bit stronger rationalization than that, and if I'm packing a character with a character with +15 to his Diplomacy skill I should be unstoppable. With those two things on my side I'll be ruling the world in under 5 sessions barring the DM doesn't have a panic attack and ban me from the game before the 3rd one.

So when the Players Guide 2 came out I borrowed it from a friend and attempted to make that uber-social bard that would break the game. My strategy was build a character with as high a Charisma as I could get, get a high Wisdom to counter other characters like myself, pump lots of points into diplomacy, and bluff and then find out what point the system broke down where I could convince kings and emperors to do my bidding.

To the game's credit, it doesn't break like I thought it does. I managed to make my bard have a diplomacy bonus of +17 at first level, but skill base is determined directly by level - meaning high-level characters will resist a low level character's Bluff attempt, and diplomacy has no hard and fast rules for resistance which means after I abuse it more than twice the DM can just assign a difficulty of 50 and I'm derailed. Not that buying the DM beers and using some sound rationale can't get past that, but it's not the game breaking results that I was looking for. However this does reveal a deeper problem which I find much more disturbing... single focus gameplay.

99% of all the mechanics in D&D are geared towards you killing something. Now I'm not some liberal pacifist gamer that believes killing is wrong or anything but if I want to kill things with my fancy avatar I'll go play an MMOG! When I want to actually play a character and triumph through cunning or fail from lack of it I turn to tabletop games. Unfortunately Wizards of the Coast doesn't believe gamers like me exist, because there is no room for cunning or nuance in D&D's mechanics. Charisma is not a social stat, it is a combat stat that emphasizes feints and ways of killing your opponent by talking at them.

For example: The bard spell Fast Friends on Pg 69 of the Players Guide 2 says you leave your opponent in Reverie for a round but all this does is make them skip their attack. No social implications at all just a combat effect... Or Blunder on the same page it Hazes your Enemy's mind, something that would have all sorts of creative applications, but the effect once again strictly combat.

All this reminds me of an old game called Warhammer Quest which I wouldn't define as a role-playing game but more of a wargame/board game hybrid. You placed down tiles to represent the dungeon you marched through encountering monsters along the way until you killed the boss and got the loot. Then you left the dungeon and rolled to see if you went to a village a town or a city, the difference in the three was how easy it was to find buyers for your special loot. Then once you'd sold your loot and bought training for your next level you'd go back to squashing monsters in the next dungeon. This was a fun game and I enjoyed it immensely but it was not a role-playing experience, it wasn't trying to be.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition has that same single focus on fighting things in tight quarters and it really seems like the times between the dungeon fighting is just supposed to be glossed over so that the players can go back to their regular Vitamin D deficient lifestyles. This seems wrong to me because D&D has spawned some extremely rich fantasy settings; why have a Forgotten Realms setting when the game is obviously only meant for you to be crawling through it's sewers smashing at rats like a cameraman filming Dirty Jobs? Why create these rich vast vistas of gameplay opportunity if the only way you can effect them is by fighting off the randomly spawning threats that pop up within them?

Why would D&D give me a corrupt town if it never meant for me to become it's mayor?