one of my take-aways from playing games like d20 Modern is that I prefer systems in which the mechanics specifically reinforce the experience of the game-world. The elegant fencing rules in Flashing Blades, the brutally lethal firearms and knife-fighting rules of Boot Hill - in my experience, these contribute to both genre-emulation and verisimilitude in the game-world in ways that more abstract systems do not, which is one of the reasons I moved away from d20 Modern, still my favorite generic roleplaying game, toward more purpose-built games.
It's also why I genuinely admire games like FATE and HeroQuest but will probably never play them. I think the mechanics of both systems are intriguing, but the prospect of actually running a game with either one holds little appeal for me.
I think this is a very interesting issue.
I think it's true that the mechanics help reinforce the experience of the gameworld. The flipside of that is that the
gameworld that is actually experienced - as opposed to the abstract object which is the fictional gameworld in all its totality - reflects the mechanics.
Playing Rolemaster makes the physical state of a PC's body a very salient and "experienced" part of the gameworld - because of the critical rules. And Rolemaster is full of penalties that affect (let's say) movement speed and athletics checks but have rather little effect on knowledge checks, because you don't need your legs to read a book or remember things. In 4e, on the other hand, the physical state of a PC's body rarely becomes salient - it all blends into the melange of hit points, together with blows to the mind (psychic damage).
On the other hand, 4e makes the physical location of characters during tactical encounters
more salient than in RM, because of the role of position in the combat rules. (Rolemaster plays very easily without maps or minis, and with positioning and location being handwaved.) So
that part of the gameworld is experienced much more in 4e - which for me is a refreshing change from my RM days.
As a GM, I find that the abstract resolution mechanics of skill challenges (comparable in certain respects to the HeroQuest mechanics that The Shaman refers to) make certain parts of the gameworld more salient to me than they otherwise might have - they force me to focus in on points of conflict and potential complication, because the mechanics require me to draw on these as part of the adjudication. I don't know to what extent it is the same, or different, on the player side.
On the "knocking prone" question, I know that in 20 years of GMing Rolemaster the question of whether a snake was on its front or back never came up - there were a few snake encounters over the years, but I only remember one involving hand-to-hand fighting, when a martial artist grappled with a giant serpent in a watery cavern - so the position of the snake was dictated primarily by the results of the martial arts critical tables. On the other hand, 4e apparently makes this aspect of the gameworld salient if only in order to resolve the question "what is happening to the snake, in the fiction, as this mechanical result is actually played out?"
So it doesn't give the
same details as more simulationist mechanics might, but it nevertheless brings certain details to the fore.
This makes me think that the problem with the prone snake may not be that it conflicts with the experience of the gameworld, or subordinates the fictional details to mere mechanics, but that it produces that experience in the wrong way (for some) - that it makes them self-consciously
create the experience, rather than having it determined by the uncontroversial interpretation of some already-established mechanical state of the relevant game elements.
As a GM I don't feel the gameworld less viscerally when I'm aware that I'm (helping with) creating it. But the GM is in a distinctive place in that respect, as it is a creative role. Is it very different from the player side?
