I mean, I don't wanna dig out my 4e core books and go quote-fishing, but I recall a lot...a LOT of emphasis on designing interesting and challenging encounters, less but still significant advice about to most effectively use monsters of various types to wage challenging combat encounters.
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I don't recall very much talk at all about how to use the presented fluff to hook players into encounters and scenes, nor anything about setting up the types on thesis/anti-thesis. "Interesting" as far as I can recall the 4e core books, was a word that applied only to tactics.
I think there is more in the "quest" discussions than you are allowing for here, but I still generally agree with you. My reading and play of 4e is heavily influenced by World & Monsters, which was the first 4e book I read, in my view one of the best GM-side books that has ever been produced for D&D, and which deals much more with the "story" (and how mechanics feed into story) rather than the tactical side of constructing encounters.
we will disagree on the impact which the default color/fluff has on play. While it is an arena that Narrativist players will find room for rather simplistic theses, its presence removes the impetus for the GM player to engage in any deeper thematic play.
I certainly agree that 4e is narrativistically light. I think it's an impediment in the Forge discussion of narrativism that it defaults to a presentation of narrativism as heavy and thematically avant-garde. (Though Edwards correctly recognises that The Dying Earth supports narrativist play, though it is clearly much more light-hearted and superficial than, say, My Life With Master.)
Good heavens! Why would that be an impediment to Narrativist play? What about it prevents the DM/players from presenting dramatic theses and challenging them? Nothing that I can see. Narrativism lives in the color, not the X's and O's of the tactical game.
I was reading colour as "mere colour". If the colour feeds into the resolution - either by interfacing with the mechanics, and/or by shaping the narration of the consequences of success/failure - then I agree with you.
Is there no risk of failure? Is 4e really D&D on "easy mode"? If not, if the level of challenge is not vanishingly small, then it can be approached in a gamist fashion
I don't disagree with that at all. But this is true - perhaps truer - for 3E. My disagreement is that 4e is specially suited for gamist play. I therefore think I'm agreeing with those who mock 4e for being D&D with "boffer swords" (is the the right terminology?) or feather dusters.
If there is a level of skill required to play Fate, my experiences would indicate that its very small indeed.
I think that would be similar to HeroQuest revised, and also Marvel Heroic RP.
Try to imagine being pretty casual and "just showing up" for a 4E game
The 3e/4e split may be based on rules-as-simulator versus rules-as-balanced-action-resolution. But by the same token, the 2e/3e split was based rules-as-DM-guidelines versus rules-as-simulator. What is at play here is not playstyle agendas (i.e., gamist v. narrativist v. simulationist), but rather the role of rules as a mediator.
Iosue, an interesting idea.
I don't think it can be disputed that 4e is "rules heavy" and, to that extent therefore, not for the faint-hearted or casual!
But nothing I've read or heard about 3E/PF makes me think it's different in that respect.
D&Dnext, as per recent playtests, I don't have a firm opinion on.
Weren't non-weapon proficiencies part of 2E from the beginning? I thought they were introduced in 1E in Unearthed Arcana (or was it Greyhawk Adventures?) and then incorporated into the core of 2E.
In 1st ed AD&D they are in Oriental Adventures (but not linked to stats) then in the two Survival Guides (in the same stat-check form as in 2nd ed). But there were not Diplomacy or Bluff or Intimidate skills to be used in the 3E or 4e sense. (See [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] above for a discussion of the Etiquette proficiency which gels with my experience.)
I agree that its not innate, but again, I think it is easier to attain deeper immersion--what we could call "player-character fusion" in which the player inhabits, so to speak, their character in theater of mind--outside than within combat in 4E, which is why I say that it is basically the same as in other editions, or at least closer to them, outside of combat.
Relating this back to the balance theme - in my personal experience one significant obstacle to deep immersion that is active rather than passive is when a player who is unfamiliar with the mechanics and expected resolution dynamics of a system declares an action based on an estimation of the colour of his/her PC, and then discovers that it doesn't work.
I remember this in the one extended 2nd ed AD&D campaign I played. We were using Skills & Powers with rolling for stats, and I had a good set of stats and built a rather twinked-out cleric who had fighter hit dice and STR. Another player, who was new to D&D, built a swashbuckling fighter (and here's a shout-out to [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION]). (Both PCs were 1st level.)
In our first encounter, which was a combat encounter, the other player struggled to take out one enemy combatant while I, with my cleric, took out 3 or 4. The player subsequently took advice for me on how to mechanically optimise character builds, and in due course brought in a mecanically more effective character. But there is no doubt that his immersion was badly affected by the disconnect between his character conception and the actual outcome, in play, of his mechanical build.
)... Here's the original post, it was an answer to a question of "protagonism" asked by Vincent Baker... and he's speaking of roleplaying games from the 1970's (Vampire and L5R didn't exist then) up to the 1990's.
