These conflicts were often established in individual campaign settings. I agree it was not established in the default rules, but the older editions tended to leave alot of fluff to campaign setting material.
Agreed.
I am missing how the point of light in your example is not simulationism.
Points of light - especially in light of Worlds and Monsters - is, at least for me, first and foremost a vibe. It's a mythical history, and then a series of fallen empires - the giants' empire, the illithid empire, the dragonborn empire, the tiefling empire, the minotaur kingdom, fallen Nerath, and probably others I've forgotten. And many of the races are defined very strongly in terms of this history - elves and eladrin in terms of the mythic history of the Feywild, dragonborn, dwarves and tieflings by their place in the sequence of empires, humans by the (comparatively) recent fall of Nerath, bringing dreams of a cosmopolitan civilisation to an abrupt end. Of the core PHB races, only Halflings have no real location in the history of the setting. (Which, to my mind, makes them the weakest race in the PHB. I'm glad none of my players plays a halfling PC.)
Various elements of this history are then referenced and brought into play by choices of class and power. (Again, some bits are weaker than others. Avandra as a god doesn't seem to bring as much with her as some of the others, for example. And some classes are inherently more boring than others, in terms of the way they engage a situation - ranger archers, for example. A party of halfing Avandra worshippers, consisting of archer rangers, laser clerics and an Essentials knight would strike me as at the more boring end of what 4e has to offer.)
As [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] noted, there is a map of Fallcrest and the Nentir vale in the DMG, but it is pretty peripheral to the history that is presented in the PHB, and that players bring into play by building their PCs. I regard this as a feature, not a flaw. When the players build their PCs (assuming they're not the above-mentioned boring party), they bring the history and "vibe" of the setting into play. Straight away, the GM knows what has to be done to engage them. Whether Fallcrest and the Nentir Vale, or some other setting, is used as the backdrop for this, is very much a secondary matter - to put it crudely, all that is needed is a place for the goblins to come from to threaten the frontier homesteaders who are the frontlines of civilisation following the fall of Nerath (in my case, I'm using the old B/X module Night's Dark Terror, which has a different configuration of settlements, forests and goblins from the Nentir Vale, but ticks all the boxes that the setting history needs).
So anyway, that's the setup for play in which the focus is not exploration, but rather hurling the PCs headlong into conflicts that resonate with the thematic concerns of the players. This is what I think 4e does better than any previous version of D&D.
But suppose, instead, that a group wants to run a game more oriented towards the exploration of a fictional setting - where "immersion, as if in a fantasy novel" is the key. Well, PoL doesn't support that very well at all - becaue the stuff that the PCs are most obviously suited to explore isn't in the material provided to the GM. Where was Bael Turath? What about Akhosia? Where, exactly, are all the fey crossings? The sorts of details that don't matter if the map is just a backdrop for play that is concerned with something else, suddenly turn out to be missing once exploration of the setting becomes the main focus of play.
Whether or not the GM uses the Nentir Vale as a starting point, I think a lot of work would be needed to run an exploration-based PoL game.
(And if doing it in 4e rather than 3E or AD&D, other issues may well come up too, like demographics, economics, levels and capabilities of NPCs, etc - all the stuff that it is well known are not matters that 4e is particularly concerned with, but that tend to matter in moer exploration-oriented play.)
Pathfinder did not FIX it in the way 4e did. They made fighters cooler, where 4e nerfed wizards completely, and in fact made everyone a wizard. just some spells are called powers.
I think there is a misapprehension here, or perhaps an implicit expression of a strong preference for simulationist rather than metagame mechanics.
It's true that the player of a 4e fighter has powers to use in the game, just as does the player of a 4e wizard (and putting Essentials to one side for the moment). But it doesn't follow that
within the fiction, the fighter PC has "powers" like the wizard PC does. The wizard PC is casting spells that are (in at least some cases) inscribed in a spellbook, and presumably were learned as distinct techniques from a mentor wise in the ways of arcae formulae. Within the gameworld, people would look at what the wizard is doing and say "Look at the spells she knows! She has mastered many magical powers!"
The fighter, on the other hand, is using a variety of techniques. And observers within the gameworld could well say "Look at the range of techniques she has mastered!" But the game does not assume - and indeed, tends to deny - that there is any one-to-one correlation between the techniques that the fictional persona has mastered, and the powers listed on the character sheet, to which the player of the fighter has access as part of the action resolution mechanics. In this respect, the rules for fighters are very different from those for wizards, which
do assume excactly that sort of one-to-one correlation.
The fighter PC in my game, who is a halberd specialist, has powers including Footwork Lure (at-will, on a hit shift and then slide enemy into vacated space), Sweeping Blow (encounter, close burst, like Whirlwind Attack in 3E), Come and Get It (encounter, pull nearby enemies within melee range and then close burst) and Passing Attack (encounter, on a hit attack a second target, and if desired shift 1 square between attacks). Mechanically, these are all different things. But in the fiction, they can sometimes be different things and somtimes not. All of them reflect the fictional persona's ability to handle a polearm with great deftness, taking advantage of its length and reach to wrongfoot opponents, while himself moving about the battlefield with great facility. But they don't correspond to discrete techniquest that the fictional character has mastered. So his ability to attack multiple opponents with quick polearm work can be reflected, on different occasions, by any of Sweeping Blow, Come and Get It or Passing Attack. His ability to strike at reach is sometimes reflected by Footwork Lure (which has a range equal to the weapon's reach) and sometimes by Come and Get It (which pulls distant foes adjacent, and then allows them to be attacked). The pull in Come and Get It itself models different things on different occasions - the reach of the polearm, the ability of the character to wrongfoot his opponents (which is also sometimes represented by Footwork Lure), and in the case of this PC only very occasionally by any desire on the part of an enemy to rush in attack him (despite what the name of the power might suggest).
It follows from this that when the player of the fighter says "I use Come and Get It" he is speaking out of character. He is telling us what he, as a player of the game, is doing. A further step is required to explain what is happening
in character, in the imagined world of the game.
It's not the same when the player of the wizard says "I use Magic Missile" - this both describes what is happening at the play table, but can also be interpreted as an in-character description of what is happening - the wizard PC is casting a particular spell, namely, Magic Missile.
So 4e's "solution" to the fighter/wizard problem is, in fact, similar to that adopted in the Buffy game (as I understand it) - namely, wizards get magical powers, but the players of fighter PCs get access to metagame benefits to compensate. It's just that in 4e those metagame benefits are
mechanically encoded in the same fashion as are the wizard's spells. The difference between them is not expressed at the mechanical level - it can only be appreciated by thinking about the contrast between what is happening, mechanically, at the table, and what this means for the fiction.
This is another reason why 4e is not particularly well-suited for the exploration-heavy play that many D&D players seem traditionally to have gone in for, because that sort of play is undermined by a strong separation of the mechanics from the fiction. The flip side is that it is precisely this greater use of metagame mechanics in 4e that suits it for non-simulationist, overt-agenda-driven play - because these metagame mechanics give the players points of leverage in the game to inject their own priorities and thereby shape the fiction, rather than just immersing in the fiction and seeing where it takes them.
Maybe there are some Greyhawk grognards in this thread who also collected all the 3E books so they can back me up. Notice how many of the Greyhawk names you mention are also in 4E, yet noone will of course argue 4E is Greyhawk. I've sold off all my 3E books, so can't quote you journal article quality sources. Ah well.
