D&D 4E 4E combat and powers: How to keep the baby and not the bathwater?

[Majoru Oakheart]

Bad, even loaded, analogy. In the case of the broken car radio, it actually isn't working for part of its functions. You're presupposing editions of D&D are broken by making that analogy. That is not the case. To fit better you have to realize that 15 minute day play styles are every bit as much a choice compared to other viable alternatives.

As far as I'm concerned, the ability to run an adventure without a time limit, with no random encounters, that works at the speed of plot with only things important to the story happening is a feature I want. If that feature doesn't work because when I use it I get the 15MAD....then there IS something broken about the system.

Thus, the analogy. A number of people don't even try to use that feature of D&D. They feel there is something wrong about playing a game that way. So they've never tried.

It's easy to say that the system isn't broken when you play differently. Since everyone on this board, and now WOTC keeps repeating that the game shouldn't tell you how to play your game, that you should tell it how you want your game to play...then shouldn't the mechanics support the game I want to play?

 

[billd91]

As far as I'm concerned, the ability to run an adventure without a time limit, with no random encounters, that works at the speed of plot with only things important to the story happening is a feature I want. If that feature doesn't work because when I use it I get the 15MAD....then there IS something broken about the system.

Thus, the analogy. A number of people don't even try to use that feature of D&D. They feel there is something wrong about playing a game that way. So they've never tried.

It's easy to say that the system isn't broken when you play differently. Since everyone on this board, and now WOTC keeps repeating that the game shouldn't tell you how to play your game, that you should tell it how you want your game to play...then shouldn't the mechanics support the game I want to play?

If the 15 minute day is what your players keep giving you, maybe it's what they want. Accommodate, adjust your expectations, or find new players. If your players didn't want the 15 minute day, they wouldn't give it to you with any edition of D&D.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

People who complained about this issue in play are generally articulating a situation where a party is expected to face multiple combat encounters but instead stops and rests to recover hit points and abilities, which feels game-y and anticlimactic. This, however, is more of a DMing issue. I don't see how a DM who didn't genuinely want this to happen could set up a set of circumstances that allowed it. There are so many simple ways of structuring a game that make this a non-issue. Thus, the 15 MAD as a game design problem is somewhat mythical, even though casters certainly do run out of spells.

I don't want this to happen. But I hate running random encounters. It feels like a waste of my time and the players'. I look at the adventure I'm running and think "Awesome, this is the session I get to run the cool trap with the waterfall I created" and instead end up with a session of "Random encounters with Orcs 4 times". I tried it. It didn't so much stop the 15MAD. The adventurers would just make sure to retreat from the dungeon and rest somewhere without random encounters. Or use a spell that would protect them from random encounters.

Which brings me to solution 2: Replenish the dungeon so that the PCs don't want to retreat from the dungeon, therefore forcing them to deal with random encounters. Not only does this force me to run random encounters, which I don't like doing in the first place...but if I do replenish the dungeon it requires me to run the exact same combats over and over again. I tried this once and ended up running a battle against 12 human guards who were guarding a door 6 times before I got so bored of rolling continual crossbow bolts that I didn't replenish them them the 7th time. Each session consisted of "So, you go back into the dungeon, roll for initiative against the guards at the gate." An hour later, they'd walk to the location they last left off in the dungeon(I only replenished the guards, because it was only a day later and it was impossible for the dungeon to replenish most of the other people inside...people like 10th level clerics). So, every session, we were spending an hour running through the same battle against 12 nameless guards who the PCs could beat without much of a problem. The PCs didn't really take damage from the battle so they didn't care if they had to face it over and over again in order to do the 15MAD. In fact, they started getting happy it was there because they were gaining levels faster than the purchased adventure I was running expected them to, so they were beating all the other encounters easier.

As for timed adventures...I kind of hate them. They end up ruining what I consider the most fun outcome if anything goes wrong, even dice rolls. One encounter along the way to the BBEG go poorly for the PCs? Now they are in a lose-lose situation. They've used too many resources to survive the BBEG, so they'll die if they continue...but if they go back and rest, then the time limit on the adventure will be up. Then, I'm going to be unable to run the next adventure I had planned where the princess, happy to be saved invites the PCs to a banquet in their honor and the king dies. Instead I have to run an adventure that I don't want to run where the PCs are kicked out of the kingdom and aren't allowed back for allowing the princess to die.

The only real way around this is to run extremely easy encounters that have no chance of going badly for the PCs. I stopped doing that in 2e. I used to spend 12 hours running a session in 2e and it entirely consisted of "You open the door. Behind it are 3 kobolds playing a game of dice. Roll for initiative. 15 minutes later, you win without taking damage. You open the next door. It has 5 kobolds behind it....."

IMHO, none of these are solutions. At least for my game.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

If the 15 minute day is what your players keep giving you, maybe it's what they want. Accommodate, adjust your expectations, or find new players. If your players didn't want the 15 minute day, they wouldn't give it to you with any edition of D&D.

My players want to win. They want to feel like they've won completely and utterly. That means win against me as a DM, win against the monsters, and win over the other PCs by making a better character than the other players.

But it isn't fun for them to win by breaking the rules. They want to play within the system. So, if they can make a character who is capable of casting 3 spells a round(swift, quickened and regular) and therefore doing 3 times more damage than anyone else in the party, they will do so. If they can make a character that, if they cast 10 spells at the beginning of a day as buffs allows them to be virtually indestructible for the next hour but then they'll be super weak...they'd do it. And then turn around before the hour is up. It isn't that they want a 15MAD. It's that they want to be as powerful as the system allows them to be. If the system allows them to be way more powerful by expending resources, they will expend those resources unless the system gives them a VERY good reason not to.

They don't do it in 4e because they aren't capable of wasting all their spells in the first 15 minutes of each day. Some of their spells come back every combat, so they aren't useless after the first combat, and even without their dailies, their effectiveness is only slightly reduced. There aren't any buffs that last an hour and then go away so they can't waste all of their spells on buffs before they fight even the first encounter.

 

[Hussar]

I don't see it in practice because I find it very rare that a party would face more than one challenging combat encounter in a game day, and because my players conserve resources pretty effectively. Also, I use spell points, which grants casters more flexibility and staying power. Even moderate level casters rarely run out of useful spells in my game. I can imagine where different styles would differ in that point.

So, in other words, you don't have the 15 MAD because you changed the rules so that you don't have that result. Spell points? One major encounter per day? Neither of these are presumed baselines in D&D. So, it's great that you don't get 15 MAD, but, I don't play your game.

How is adding in powers any different than adding in spell points? Ok, I get the basic mechanical difference, but, if WOTC went to a spell point system for casters, you'd see EXACTLY the same criticisms leveled as we see with powers. Sure, they could have gone with a SP solution. It does work. They simply went a different way.

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Bill91 - again, what you are saying is true. But, what if I don't WANT the mechanics to dictate my playstyle? You're happy because the mechanics fit your playstyle and that's great.

For you.

OTOH, I can play your style - lots of random encounters, time based adventures (Dungeon 200 has Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Flame's Last Flicker) which is predicated on not allowing the PC's to take an extended rest as an example) OR I can play my style, explorations and what not, both using the same system - 4e.

And this is the basic point that seems to get ignored. 3e doesn't work for some of us. It really, honestly, truly doesn't. We have to jump through all sorts of hoops to make it work in the way we want it to. But, now, we have the choice - play 4e which fits both styles of games quite easily.

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Eldritch_Lord - I get what you're saying. But, honestly, the number of corner cases where you actually can't explain the power in game is pretty small. At least, IME, it is. Now, if you want to talk about specific problems? I'm right behind you - Bard, I'm looking at YOU (gack, joking the skeleton to death bugs me to no end). But, something like Come and Get It? Healing Surges? Really? Those are very, very easy to narrate from an in game perspective. There's thread after thread explaining a million different ways to rarrate them. Healing surges only become a problem if you absolutely insist on describing in intricate detail what effect an attack has - which then has its own problems of believability (you took a arrow in the arm, but, you can still use your arm perfectly well - what?).

 

[Ahnehnois]

So, in other words, you don't have the 15 MAD because you changed the rules so that you don't have that result. Spell points? One major encounter per day? Neither of these are presumed baselines in D&D. So, it's great that you don't get 15 MAD, but, I don't play your game.

Spell points are somewhat incidental to the issue (and are a commonly used rule presented in UA, FWIW). I didn't see the issue before I adopted that rule either.

And how is one combat encounter per day unusual? The core XP system assumes that 13.3 encounters gains you a level. That really isn't very many. I can't imagine that even a 20th level character has fought multiple challenging battles in a single day more than a few times. If you do that (even if you have a month of no combat in between combat days) characters level so quickly they'll be in epic before they reach middle age if they keep fighting and winning (remembering that a "challenging" battle as defined by that system is almost trivially easy). Pacing varies, but I would think the default assumption is that multiple challenging encounters in a day is an unusual situation that should really push the characters.

How is adding in powers any different than adding in spell points? Ok, I get the basic mechanical difference, but, if WOTC went to a spell point system for casters, you'd see EXACTLY the same criticisms leveled as we see with powers. Sure, they could have gone with a SP solution. It does work. They simply went a different way.

I think if you gave spell points to fighters, people would have complained. If the spell points had been per "encounter", people would have complained. Whether mages use spell slots or spell points is a relatively minor issue by comparison.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Heck, the cube is a "game mechanics" monster, right up there with trappers, lurkers above, and rust monsters.

Ah, that Gygax . . .

The gelatinous cube isn't so much a "game mechanics" monster in the same sense that a rust monster or mimic is, as it is a "dungeon ecology" monster--it's there to explain how corpses are removed, dungeons are cleaned, and so forth, and its common use as a treasure-dissolver or PC-eater at the bottom of pit traps is secondary.

I respectfully disagree. Fourth edition DMG specifically calls for the DM to make rulings. I appreciated that--it removed some of the rules-lawyering of 3e.

Further, I didn't need to wait for errata to tell me that an ooze couldn't be knocked prone, or that a gelatinous cube could not be affected by Come and Get It.

You didn't need to wait for errata to tell you that, but there shouldn't be any need for that in the first place. Again, the main issue here is the tension between increased codification and increased reliance on DM interpretation. 4e added tons of keywords for various things, and those keywords made things a lot more streamlined, concise, and easy to interpret, just like 3e adding lots of keywords made things more streamlined, concise, and easy to interpret than similar situations in AD&D.

Yet many things in the game were introduced which ignored keywords or at least didn't make use of them. How hard would it be to make keywords for physical forced movement vs. persuaded forced movement? How hard would it be to have a "persuasive" keyword for intimidation-/insult-type effects to govern how they operate, or a "mindless" keyword to govern how oozes, zombies, etc. operate? Again, people rave about how codified powers empower players and allow them to achieve what they want without DM fiat, then turn around and say that many changes are "obvious" and that DMs can do things how they want, and you simply can't have it both ways.

I don't think a new rules set should rely on rulings--4e certainly doesn't. I think that the new rules should specifically tell DMs that it's okay to make rulings--in fact, that he or she should do so. I think that should be pointed out in the PHB, as well.

More than telling the DM that he can make rulings--which every DMG has done--it should tell him how to make rulings. Advice like how to decide on the ruling to make, polling players before making large changes, informing players in advance about changes, etc. would make things a lot better for new (or simply bad) DMs out there.

Eldritch_Lord - I get what you're saying. But, honestly, the number of corner cases where you actually can't explain the power in game is pretty small. At least, IME, it is. Now, if you want to talk about specific problems? I'm right behind you - Bard, I'm looking at YOU (gack, joking the skeleton to death bugs me to no end). But, something like Come and Get It? Healing Surges? Really? Those are very, very easy to narrate from an in game perspective. There's thread after thread explaining a million different ways to rarrate them. Healing surges only become a problem if you absolutely insist on describing in intricate detail what effect an attack has - which then has its own problems of believability (you took a arrow in the arm, but, you can still use your arm perfectly well - what?).

Whether you can explain the mechanic in game (which you almost always can), and whether it comes with "default" fluff that meshes with everything else, are two separate things.

Take hit points, for example, the favorite whipping boy of simulation vs. narrative discussions. Hit points are described as wounds, luck, morale, fatigue, the ability to turn lethal blows into less lethal ones, and more, and are treated as one or more of those in various ways. Falling damage and poisoned stingers treat them as wounds, temporary HP and morale-based healing treat them as morale, weapon damage often treats them as luck+fatigue and more. There is no "default fluff" that works for everyone that covers every instance in the rules. HP work fine as purely physical damage, since D&D characters quickly go from being normal people to superhuman and would be completely justified in simply falling from orbit and landing unharmed or taking dozens of arrows to the chest and surviving, but many people like to see high-level play as "LotR/Conan with bigger numbers" and are offended by this interpretation.

HP can be fluffed as fatigue, luck, and damage mitigation, until you come up against an ability that delivers effects on a successful attack and you have to determine whether the attacker actually made contact. HP can be fluffed as partly morale, but then you have issues like how a 3e crusader/4e warlock "encourages" an unconscious person who can't hear him to get back up and keep fighting. If you have one, single, consistent fluff for a mechanic that is provided as a baseline, you can change it deliberately and be able to account for any quirks, but if you have multiple inconsistent fluff takes on a single mechanic it doesn't work too well.

Marking is another inconsistent mechanic. Is a mark intimidating the fighter's enemies? If so, why can't a fearless character/higher-level character/high-Will character ignore the penalty? Is a mark instead boxing in an opponent to hinder his actions? If so, why doesn't it stack with a paladin's mark, since they penalize for different reasons? If you provide a single, coherent explanation for what's going on, then not only do you allow players and DMs to logically deduce effects of the mechanic in game, but you can also refluff it without changing the mechanics--for instance, if marking means following people very closely, then you can determine that a mark is logically broken if the marking creature is immobilized (for instance), and you can also determine that if you refluff it to be scaring people that there are now different ways to break a mark and you need to take those into account.

As mentioned above, this isn't just a 4e problem; 3e has similar issues in many places, though the legacy AD&D mechanics and phrasing tend to provide more consistent fluff. Evasion is a great example. It's a common ability that many classes get at low levels, but we never find out how it works. You take no damage if you make a Ref save for half against something unless you're immobilized. Do you do this by dodging out of the way of the explosion? If so, why don't you move from your space out of the area of the effect? Do you do this by reflexively taking cover somehow? If so, why can you use it when there's no cover around and you're not holding a shield/cloak/etc.? Do you do this by exploiting gaps in explosions and such? If so, how does this work against a uniform sphere like a fireball, and how can you react fast enough to find them but not act fast in other circumstances? Again, you can explain this satisfactorily, but each explanation has cascading effects, and every ruling has different consequences, which is not a desirable side effect of a pure refluffing.

So, again, it all comes down to the difference between the game providing a default, consistent explanation/mechanic for everything and allowing DMs and players to extrapolate from there (good) and the game providing no explanation/mechanic for something and expecting DMs and players to make stuff up (bad). Having fluff or crunch for something that exists at all, and that can be referenced by other fluff/crunch and changed or ignored if a DM wants, is always better than having none at all for it and making it either inconsistent or existing in a vacuum.

 

[Hussar]

Spell points are somewhat incidental to the issue (and are a commonly used rule presented in UA, FWIW). I didn't see the issue before I adopted that rule either.

And how is one combat encounter per day unusual? The core XP system assumes that 13.3 encounters gains you a level. That really isn't very many. I can't imagine that even a 20th level character has fought multiple challenging battles in a single day more than a few times. If you do that (even if you have a month of no combat in between combat days) characters level so quickly they'll be in epic before they reach middle age if they keep fighting and winning (remembering that a "challenging" battle as defined by that system is almost trivially easy). Pacing varies, but I would think the default assumption is that multiple challenging encounters in a day is an unusual situation that should really push the characters.

I would point out that the default assumption is 4 (ish) encounters per adventuring day. That's how 3e is balanced. If you only have one encounter per day, then, by definition, you are having a 15 MAD. That's what a 15 MAD IS. Sure you could spend 7 hours poncing about doing other stuff, but, when the dice hit the table, the adventuring day is now 15 minutes long.

I think if you gave spell points to fighters, people would have complained. If the spell points had been per "encounter", people would have complained. Whether mages use spell slots or spell points is a relatively minor issue by comparison.

Considering how much verbiage has gone on against adding spell point systems to D&D, I would disagree with this. From Gygax, onwards, spell point systems are not something most people consider to be something for D&D.

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Eldritch Lord -

So, again, it all comes down to the difference between the game providing a default, consistent explanation/mechanic for everything and allowing DMs and players to extrapolate from there (good) and the game providing no explanation/mechanic for something and expecting DMs and players to make stuff up (bad). Having fluff or crunch for something that exists at all, and that can be referenced by other fluff/crunch and changed or ignored if a DM wants, is always better than having none at all for it and making it either inconsistent or existing in a vacuum.

I think the mistake you make here is that there can be only one interpretation for something and that interpretation must always be true for it to be consistent. That's not really true. Saying that HP are sometimes morale and sometimes meat is perfectly consistent so long as the times when you treat it as one or the other is consistent.

There never has been a consistent fluff to hit points and that's what, I think, makes a lot of people pull out their hair in these discussions. HP=Meat doesn't work because then you have, as you say, superhumans walking around. Somehow killing goblins means that I'm now tougher, actually physically tougher, than an elephant. True, it is consistent, but, not terribly believable.

And there are all sorts of other issues. Which isn't to say that there isn't issues with making HP more abstract. Again, I get that. But, one of those issues isn't consistency. It is consistent. When you get scared by something nasty and lose hp, HP=morale, when you fall into a well and Lassie has to go get Timmy, HP=meat. When you wander through the desert and suffer from exposure, HP=toughness.

What would be inconsistent would be to try to say that HP= one and only one thing all the time and we should simply mold the in game reality around that mechanic.

/edit for another thought

If you provide a single, coherent explanation for what's going on, then not only do you allow players and DMs to logically deduce effects of the mechanic in game, but you can also refluff it without changing the mechanics

The danger, though, of providing a single, coherent explanation is twofold. First, you are dictating the game to the players. The players and the fiction in the game, MUST follow this explanation, no matter what. The second problem comes when the provided explanation is lacking. Sure, it might cover this or that, but, it doesn't cover these other things. So, you wind up right back with the problem of endless errata. Additionally, any subsequent mechanics also must follow this single, coherent explanation, meaning that the design space is necessarily smaller because all new mechanics must not stray from the original explanation.

I'd much rather give DM's and players the benefit of the doubt that they can, as a group, come up with plausible explanations, if they need to.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

I think the mistake you make here is that there can be only one interpretation for something and that interpretation must always be true for it to be consistent. That's not really true. Saying that HP are sometimes morale and sometimes meat is perfectly consistent so long as the times when you treat it as one or the other is consistent.

There never has been a consistent fluff to hit points and that's what, I think, makes a lot of people pull out their hair in these discussions. HP=Meat doesn't work because then you have, as you say, superhumans walking around. Somehow killing goblins means that I'm now tougher, actually physically tougher, than an elephant. True, it is consistent, but, not terribly believable.

And there are all sorts of other issues. Which isn't to say that there isn't issues with making HP more abstract. Again, I get that. But, one of those issues isn't consistency. It is consistent. When you get scared by something nasty and lose hp, HP=morale, when you fall into a well and Lassie has to go get Timmy, HP=meat. When you wander through the desert and suffer from exposure, HP=toughness.

What would be inconsistent would be to try to say that HP= one and only one thing all the time and we should simply mold the in game reality around that mechanic.

I'm not saying that there must always be a one-to-one mapping of flavor to mechanics, I'm saying that there is a problem if you have some mechanics have one flavor in some circumstances and another flavor in others without consistent rationale. I completely agree that having HP abstract is useful, and that it can be done well...but it hasn't been implemented well in the past. Crusader/warlord healing doesn't work well when paired with falling damage, as you have a HP-as-morale healing effect attempting to heal HP-as-wound damage. Poison stingers, death rays, and other attacks with rider effects don't work well when compared against your measure of combat effectiveness, as you have a situation where you take HP-as-luck-and-fatigue damage but the stinger/ray/etc. would logically need to deal HP-as-wounds damage and actually make contact to take effect.

The lack of consistency in the explanation of HP is the problem I'm highlighting--specifically, that many mechanics in the post-AD&D editions have thrown up their hands and abstracted things away without giving thought to the in-game rationale. Leaving things up to the DM to decide in his game results in something like having one DM use 3e or 4e HP as written, one use the Vitality/Wounds variant, and one use HP-as-wounds. One game has useful, abstract, but inconsistent HP; one has useful, abstract, consistent, elegant HP but drastically more lethal combat; and one has useful, abstract, consistent HP but an in-game disconnect with superheroic characters. These little changes have wide-ranging effects, and one must first have a common language describing what each effect means in-game and does mechanically before one can customize the game to suit one's taste, else we will come right back to the HP problem again.

The danger, though, of providing a single, coherent explanation is twofold. First, you are dictating the game to the players. The players and the fiction in the game, MUST follow this explanation, no matter what. The second problem comes when the provided explanation is lacking. Sure, it might cover this or that, but, it doesn't cover these other things. So, you wind up right back with the problem of endless errata. Additionally, any subsequent mechanics also must follow this single, coherent explanation, meaning that the design space is necessarily smaller because all new mechanics must not stray from the original explanation.

I'd much rather give DM's and players the benefit of the doubt that they can, as a group, come up with plausible explanations, if they need to.

The 3e sorcerer derives his power from draconic, fiendish, or other special heritage. Says so right there in the PHB. Except that if you decide you want to have a different power source for your sorcerer, you can do so, because the fluff doesn't impact the mechanics. You just say "My mom wasn't a dragon, I just had some arcane experiments done on me at a young age!" and poof! you have magic without any dragons involved.

The 3e paladin must be lawful good, he has powers useful against evil creatures, and has a code of conduct enforcing his behavior. If you decide you want to have a different cause for your paladin, such as serving a god who would send you after chaotic foes more than evil ones or one who upholds different ideals of lawful goodness, you can't just discard the fluff, because the mechanics are intertwined with the flavor; any fluff changes have to change the crunch as well.

The 3e fighter is a rough, tough, mercenary kind of guy, a gruff veteran who gets the job done and can take a lot of damage before going down. Of course, that's the stereotype, but you can play a fighter as a tactically-gifted commander type as well.

The above examples illustrate several points. First off, a default explanation is not always hindering, and in fact can be quite helpful--sorcerer fluff is a starting point but is completely nonbinding due to having no mechanics attached, and the default fluff opens the door for things like heritage feats to build off it without penalizing people who want to use different fluff. Second, a badly-implemented explanation (or a lack of one at all) causes problems--paladins are lawful good, yet have only anti-evil abilities and not anti-chaotic ones? Paladins are expected to redeem villains yet can't travel with them at all? Why? Who knows! Once again, some simple changes (either making them any Good or allowing smiting of chaotic creatures, loosening the code, or the like) would make things a lot better, but because the mechanics and flavor don't mesh, there are some issues.

Third, you can have default fluff and successfully change that fluff without changing existing mechanics--you can make a swashbucklery fighter, a noble fighter, a dastardly fighter, a mercenary fighter, and more, with no change to the class mechanics at all. The baseline fluff is helpful, again, and serves a certain purpose--everyone knows basically what a fighter is and has a common understanding of the default--but you are not shackled to it.

Does the game dictate that all players must follow the holy writ of draconic sorcerers? Does the concept of the fighter restrict choice or require errata? No and no. Would we have nearly the variety or ingenuity in flavor or mechanics if the sorcerer, paladin, and fighter were reduced to "magic guy," "holy guy," and "sword guy," with the rest of it left up to groups to decide? Is a baseline level of fluff required to give a game an identity and ensure continuity of flavor between tables and groups? Yes and yes.

 

[Hussar]

As you say, the fluff of the Sorcerer in 3e has absolutely no mechanical impact, and, IIRC, it even says in the PHB that it might not actually be true. The draconic heritage is one idea, but, certainly not set in stone. So, ejecting that fluff for anything else isn't really what we're talking about here. But, the next bit:

The 3e fighter is a rough, tough, mercenary kind of guy, a gruff veteran who gets the job done and can take a lot of damage before going down. Of course, that's the stereotype, but you can play a fighter as a tactically-gifted commander type as well.

Actually, this is where I have a problem. Because fighter as tactically gifted commander falls down when you try to apply it in 3e. For one, he doesn't have the skill points to actually BE a gifted commander - anything that would actually require mechanical resolution, say, using a historical battle to emulate tactics, he'd fail at miserably. Plus, he has absolutely no inherent ability to lead or influence others.

IOW, a fighter makes no better "tactically gifted commander type" than any other class and frequently is quite a bit worse. Almost any other class makes a better fit for this concept.

And I think that's where the idea that fluff must equal mechanics falls down. To me, some mechanics are purely meta-game in nature. The 4e fighter's marking powers are a good example of this. What happens in game when a fighter marks a target? Nothing whatsoever. Nothing in that game world changes. However, at a metagame level, the fighter is using some of his agency to influence the outcome of the situation.

Lots of other games do this when you try to balance the muggles with the magicians. Buffy comes to mind immediately, although there's a boatload of others. It's the recognition that if you force the muggle character to only what they can do inside the game, you might as well call them sidekick's and be done with it. Because they're never, ever going to come anywhere near par with the casters.

However, I think this is also a major sticking point for some people.