A lot of what you have to say here, Janna, is really great and to the point. Cities are pretty amazing as dungeons – try mapping even a small American town and see how many ten-by-ten squares THAT takes…! And when you consider the potential for real dungeon-crawl type encounters – a house-to-house search for instance…well!

One thing I’ve also noted is, all of you have mentioned directly the city as seen from the viewpoint of adventurers who almost always resort to violence to sort out a situation; the automatic assumption appears to be that the city guard will always have a problem with the PCs and so they must either tread very lightly and stay for short periods, or they must go underground and do all their work covertly. Not that any of this is bad, mind you.

My players have adopted quite a different approach though. Through their choices and actions in the campaign, they’re on the side of the law – they walk the streets quite openly and are beginning to earn a reputation among the upper and middle class citizenry – a reputation that actually gets them invited to genteel parties and has also earned them the patronage of the King himself. Granted that it doesn’t hurt their standing that two of the PCs are related to said King…but in point of fact they could easily have done things differently and be at a point where they’re all wanted for some crime or other. The way I structured this campaign, they could as easily have become crime lords. My entire campaign is, in fact, structured around the back stories of the characters as much as possible, and the entire city is a kind of sandbox. Even if there weren’t a cult of fanatical devotees to a sadistic dark god trying to infiltrate the city, there would be plenty for the characters to do.

My particular campaign is set in 3.5 for a number of reasons. One reason is that 4E had just hit the shelves when we started the campaign; another is that our group had tried the first 4E adventure module AND a homebrew campaign, no one really liked it other than our resident “wizard player.” Myself, I had mixed reactions to it. Like Valmar, I find the skill set in 4E to be kind of simplistic. That’s both a blessing and a curse – it encourages a swifter pace, more action, more actual talking rather than dice rolling – as my husband says, more role-playing than roll-playing. But it also takes away the framework that lets the players (and the DM) establish how difficult a given non-combat task is. Being swindled by a level-1 commoner or swindling him should be more difficult than tricking a nobleman out of his jewelry or lying to a judge and getting away with it, right? But as pointed out above, if your players can talk the talk, what keeps them from simply walking all over the scenario? The dice rolls, of course. I find it much easier to use the 3.5 skill system. It might be less streamlined than 4E but at least I know what I’m doing (more or less). Or I can fake it.

One thing about 4E currently: I can’t fake it there, and everyone at the table knows as much about the game as I do, therefore they know when I’m trying to fake it…and this leads to either someone trying to pull the “that’s not in the book!” argument, or to a complete halt to the game action as we have to sit and look up whatever rule it is…again…and again…

A friend sent me this old link as we’re planning a city campaign right now. Some good general advice here.

As to the skills argument, I agree with Velmar. Yes, roleplaying doesn’t really need a dice roll but what if someone is abusing that? You have someone playing a low charisma Fighter but the Player is quite witty, quick and good at talking. By roleplaying a talking encounter they are NOT roleplaying their character. Likewise you could have someone who’s isn’t that good on their verbal toes who has gone out on a limb to play a bard. The Skills there act as a back-up and a help to them.

Pure roleplay is all well and good, but it’s too easy for Players to do the work and not their characters.