Barastrondo
First Post
From my reading of 4e, not as such, at least as far as the martial classes go. The player chooses when the opportunity arises. I would read it as something like this "on round 2, Faustina attempts to hamstring her opponent as part of her exchange of blows, and the player uses Hamstring" (I am making up powers here). Then, "on round 4, Faustina tries another shot at hamstringing her opponent as part of her exchange of blows, but the opportunity isn't there, and the player uses one of her at-wills to represent the blow that does have an opportunity." It's an approach that jives with the old, old idea that a combat round would involve a number of feints, parries, inaccurate strikes, but that you don't roll separately for each. The attack roll represents the culmination of the round.
Of course, a lot of mechanics in 4e are designed to represent genre conventions, rather than simulate a reality. Minions are a good example, but let's also take the idea of swarm mechanics. Consider the difference between statting out a swarm as a single entity and statting out each individual creature within it. From any realistic standpoint, a swarm of bees or a platoon of soldiers wouldn't be observed by the characters as singular entities, but collections of individuals. But mechanically, they work as one enemy because it's elegant gaming. The mechanics represent rather than simulate — or rather, they might simulate reality, but more often they simulate the dramatic conventions of romantic fantasy. (And I really want to try the "stat out an enemy platoon as a very large swarm" trick sometime; that would be a fantastic way for epic characters to stand against armies that challenge them as a whole even as individual soldiers wouldn't.)
It gets even more interesting when you look at how skill challenges can be constructed to simulate things that would often require more complicated subsystems. A skill challenge like "outrun the orc army, slaying their advance scouts as you go" is entirely feasible. However, the slaying of scouts can be handled with a simple skill check rather than full-fledged combat in this particular instance.
And of course, there's the whole "reskinning" practice, in which you can take the statistics of one monster and modify them to represent a different one; using an oni stat block for a rakshasa, for instance. Since monsters are statted out according to their role rather than an attempt at consistent biology, reskinning works very well.
Your first premise, that the world operates in a consistent manner, is not quite the same thing as saying that the world will always operate under the same rules. It seems to me perfectly feasible that the characters will see one layer of consistency, in which an angry mob is a number of individual people all swept along, while the players see the rules interface of "swarm" or "skill challenge," and react accordingly. I think in order for characters to be able to carefully deduce most of the rules of the world, they would need a system that doesn't try for elegance (a design goal that always requires some sort of compromise on "accuracy"), and that stays far away from simulating dramatic conventions. 4e is really not that game.
Edit: Okay, thought of another example. Spirit of the Century has a power called "Master of Disguise." When the player activates this power, the character leaves the scene. At any point in a later scene, the player can call in a fate point to nominate any unnamed character standing around — a random mook, a reporter in the crowd, the royal executioner — and said character whips off the disguise, and the player character is standing there. From the point of view of the rules, the player character is removing an NPC and replacing them. From the point of view of the characters, though, "Good Lord, it was Agent Ace all along!" Spirit of the Century is that kind of game. It uses the rules to simulate dramatic conventions and the feel of a pulp novel. 4e is kind of in that vein.
(I love that power so much.)
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