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That is where the whiteboarding site and the gridless combat rules come in. VOIP should make it easier to communicate about the more complex combat stuff than just text. Mearls himself said it should not be very hard to do gridless combat, and the EnWorld link I provided took his advice one step...

Please don't open this unless you promise to not be offended.

I intend to play 4e without minis or a battle grid over the interwebs. Sounds heretical, but stay tuned, and you too may be able to accomplish this seemingly impossible task. To start, I am Old Skool. Not even the type of old school that is cool anymore. I started playing D&D at the age of ten...

Yeah, I get the point, but we are talking about ideals here right. If I can't wax hyperbolic in a rant on En World, where can I? ;) I am definitely not getting all I ask for regularly. I am just striving for it. I think that 4e is likely to facilitate this ideal better than any previous...

I sure hope so. That is the Holy Grail in my opinion.

I like the roles. Gonna keep em.

I'm calling shenanigans (sp?) on Ash. That dude was too cool. The first movies only sorta count because they sucked. Then they rehashed it and it sucked again. Only when they rehashed it the last time, and really came to terms with the ultimate suckitude of the first two, did they not suck...

I find this to be enlightening and somehow frustrating all at once. I was under the impression that I preferred a fair mix of nar and gam, and I have been relatively turned off by sim. I have played in games where it was "plot-less", where the impetus of the action was all on the players. I...

Those are all great examples Rex. I would also like to point out that all of them are characters that were normal in their background, but not when the stories start. The normalness of these characters is fluff, not game play. Not that you said anything to the contrary, but these could easily be...

Emphasis mine. I agree with this whole heartedly. It is also how I think that characters in 4e will end up being like. All of the changes that are bugging people about 4e just amount to giving the PCs "plot super powers". There has been a massive amount of protagonization (is that actually a...

In a thread earlier this year we had quite an argument about this idea. I subscribe to the camp that says that the rules of the game are not the physics of the fantasy universe. In fantasy literature, characters are always doing things that are amazing, even if not physics defying for that...

I have had this feeling for a while, and the interesting thing is that I really don't understand the firm stance of the anti-4e crowd at all. It really does seem vey modular. Paizo has said that 4e does not allow them to tell the stories that they like to tell, but I feel like the storytelling...

I self identify as narrativist with gamist tendencies. I think that there is an inherent bias in the current GNS theory literature that is tilted toward narrativism. The way most of the essays are writen, nar seems both the most pure or noble form of role play, and the most difficult for players...

This brings up an interesting point for current GNS theory. It may be possible to have no tension between any of the legs of the triangle, as long as each leg deals with a separate area of the game, or lives on a different scale of the game. In the area of public health this strange tension is...

I think that this is the kind of thing that will go on in WotC R&D rooms, as well as design rooms in many 3rd party publishers. This is a good start, and I think that we will all have fun with this kind of thing. That being said, I think that the multiclass base classes will still fall into a...

I like the idea that this easy progression could be converted directly into bonus and power slots instead of item slots for a lower magic campaign. If one wants a no item campaign, the DM can just fill these slots with powers from plot specific backgrounds/templates instead of magic items. Sure...

Exploits are gamist constructs. As such, they do not need to be explicitly described. Do you have to tell him how many HP the hobos have? Of course not. Exploits fall under the same umbrella. That is, unless he has something that is triggered by them. Then you kinda have to tell him when it...

So for me, this is the area that the GNS system needs to work on. The Narrativist concept seems to be all about empowering the players to create/play the characters/stories/themes that they want. The Gamist concept seems to value the fun/challenge of the rules more than modeling anything in...

From the literary sources that I have read, the concept of weakness of a beginning character was also paired with ignorance of "the ways of the world." This ignorance was present for Bilbo and Frodo, for Luke Skywalker, for Rand al'Thor and Co., and many others. The loss of this innocence...