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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5866421" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you say here is highly plausible, but if it were literally true than (mechanically) vanilla narrativism would be literally impossible - wherea I believe (from my actual play experience) that it is not.I think if scenes are framed where the fictional dynamics are such as to give the players reason to align their resource expenditure with their characters' motivations, then narrativist play can emerge without the tighter mechanical link that you posit.A concrete, if simple, example: The PCs stumble onto a group of goblins. One of them is the leader who killed the dwarf fighter's sidekick in an earlier fight. Therefore the dwarf fighter charges that leader, leaving the rest of the group to deal with the rest of the goblins.In this example, we have resource expenditure (in combat actions, any resources - like powers, APs etc that might be spent to boost that action, etc) being linked to character motivation. But not via mechanics, but rather via fiction (plus clear if informal flags being run up by the players in earlier episodes of play, and the GM responding to those flags in subsequent encounter building).But this sort of example can only work if the game won't break down, at the mechanical level, when the dwarf fighter charges the goblin leader leaving the other PCs to deal with the rest of the goblins. That is a system design issue. My understanding (based on the reports of others, not my own experience) is that 3E can't handle this sort of play, because its "rocket tag" nature means that if one PC goes off on a frolic of his/her own, the rest of the group may well be hosed. My own experience with 4e has shown that it can handle this sort of play, because the PCs are mechanically robust enough that there is a very large and viable "space" for play that is within the realm of the dramatic, but well away from the realm of the TPK.I'll let those on the anti-metagame mechanics side speak for themselves. From my point of view, I worry that a fatigue-style system will not give me what I enjoy in 4e's power system.We've already seen suggestions (on this thread, I think) that it be linked to hit point expenditure - and others have called in other threads for 4e healing surges to be renamed "heroic surges" and used as a type of recharge mechanism - and that creates the prospects of martial PCs having to manage a single resource pool whereas casters have two such pools to draw upon.Second, a fatigue-style system is not going to give me something like pre-errata Come and Get It. It's probably not even going to give me something like the archer ranger's immediate actions, which (at my table, at least) go some way to reducing the "stop-motion" feel of turn-based combat.And it will also get in the way of narration and visualisation. At present, for example, there is no reason to think that the fiction of a single-target Footwork Lure, in circumstances when the polearm fighter in my game is surrounded by foes, and a multi-target pre-errata Come and Get It, is all that different. In both cases he does fancy stuff with his polearm, taking advantage of his reach to outwit and wrongfoot his opponents. Sometimes he succeeds against one. Sometimes he succeeds against several. There is a lot of fluidity here, and it helps both reduce threats of same-y-ness, and also support for some narrative twists and turns to smooth over gaps in the correlation between mechancis and fiction that might otherwise come up in a turn-based, discrete-action-based, combat resolution system.Once the encounter powers are locked into a fiction-expressing, fatigue-based system, though, that narrative fluidity will be lost. If the mechanics are turn-based and discrete-action-based, there will be pressure to understand the gameworld itself in such terms. And other pressures will emerge too, to make the fatigue system more verismilitudinous in this way or that.Now all the above is pretty harsh on your suggestion, and I don't want to say that I think it's unworkable from the outset. But I do think there are underlying pressures from the players on each side of this divide - what they are wanting the mechanics of the game to do for them - that may tend to make any compromise inherently unstable.I tend to agree pretty strongly with this, which is why I think any compromise will be hard to pull off.</blockquote>

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