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The fairness issue that I brought up was in response to the stated unfairness of not building the NPCs and PCs in the same way. And yes, PCs don't exist either. :D This was an unfortunate misphrasing on my part. I was thinking about how the players create and play their characters, vs. how the...

Yeah I liked it too. Too many unknowns are used as either the panacea or doom of the new edition. Funny. :)

I can understand a level of immersion necessary, but why would you assume that there needs to be rules for looting armor? Make it up. For WotC, the name of the game is to design rules for things that are fun and common, give simple rules for adjudicating outside of the normal rules, and depend...

For those interested, there has been a discussion going on about this here. http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=227263

This is exactly right. The two basicaly exist in parallel, only touching where they need to. In the instance of the characters wanting to sell the kobold armor, I would ask first, to who? Then I would ask, don't you have better things to do as heroes than become used kobold armor traders? If the...

You have sumed things up nicely Doug, and have hit on why I either don't like GNS at the moment, or I completely don't understand it. The words simulation, narrative, and game do not necessarily intuitively imply what GNS says they are. Less ambiguous terms would help.

I think that I will address several posts at once here. For those that have claimed that worldbuilding is nonsensical if any game constructs that describe the elements of the world are inconsistent in a one to one mapping fashion, with mutability of the results/game elements being a weakness of...

So it is more of an issue of a consistent one to one cause-effect sort of resolution. The rules can be there, in your face, and as "unbelievable" as needed, just that there is no interpretation of them. The general theme is Input + Rule-> Unambiguous Output. No interpretation necessary. Maybe...

You may be right, but that is not what I interpreted when I heard "minion swarm". I got the impression that this referred to an abstraction of the actual number of minions, and the swarm of them didn't get any weaker until the whole of them were killed.

I love abstract hitpoints. Nothing about them says what happened. You get to add the cool in whatever doses you can handle. Same with all the other metagame stuff. Fluff to taste.

So are there simulationist gamers that don't mind a serious metagame? Is simulationist a euphemism for "one who requires the rules to fade into the background"? I am curious about this. It might really change my understanding of GNS. I had just thought that I had pinned down what category I...

Any debate about 4e contains the unwritten statement "This is all assuming that I have guessed right about what 4e will be like." There is a lot of preview material, but he rules aren't out yet.

Exactly.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Twiddla may be all that you really need. Text chat, VOIP, and very basic mapping. Good enough. The others are more for campaign organization, and are unnecessary for the gaming itself. There are a few cool things that you could pull off with...

I have not yet played 4e, but playtest reports have stated that there is still a very real threat of dying in 4e. I am not sure if people are actually comparing 4e characters to 4e NPCs, or if they are comparing 4e characters to 3.x NPCs/PCs. This would make a big difference, and will only be...

This is why I still have a problem with the GNS theory. You are assuming that the game mechanics actually exist from a character's perspective, and like any natural law, can be discovered by them. This to me is the only way to explain why anyone has a hard time with aligning their fluff and...

Weak and strong are relative terms. Only by giving a baseline of adversaries can this be true. Same applies here. Bildungsroman does not require any mechanical support to achieve. It requires that the characters start "normal" and progress to "accomplished", and usually refers more to personal...

I hate to tell you this, but yes, it is too much to ask. We can't even get that right in our universe, with all of science, philisophy, and theology trying their hardest to put all the pieces together. When we want another universe to make sense in the same way ours does, plus add in all the...

I am curious what you think are negative aspects that are inherent to the game mechanics of 4e. I would hazard a guess that this is a rusult of using an "emergent properties" world building approach with an "exception based, outpout oriented" game system. Exception based means that anything that...

Black box, white box, I'm the game with results. See, to me it boiled down to the fact that the two editions went about design from opposite ends of the game. 3e said that it wanted to have an amazing number of options for world/monster/PC design. Then everything that is 3e as we know it was an...