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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7531606" data-attributes="member: 4937">I can't tell.  I mean, I really can't tell.  The closest I can get is that the implications of the scene is that the PC's are fairly high level, and the wizard's comparative impotence suggests that magic is a weaker source of narrative power in 4e than in other D&D systems.I'm mostly quoting this post as a useful jumping off point for what has been bugging me this entire thread, because the poster seems to think that a lot can be learned about the rules set from the transcript of play, and I'm not at all convinced that that is true.  I think that's true only for a certain approach to rules that I consider to be highly untraditional and heavily influenced by the phrase "system matters", and which ironically despite that claim seems to always view rules in a negative manner - as things that are forbidden from play.  That is to see, they see the purpose of the rules to strongly exclude from the play everything that isn't in the rules.This is I would say a viewpoint strongly opposed to the traditional assumption of play in an RPG, and it is a viewpoint that can be applied to any rules set but which can also be eschewed for any ruleset.The traditional approach to play in a PnP RPG is that you are simulating the world and therefore there is nothing that is not a matter of play.  Rather than seeing the purpose of the rules to be to tell you how to play, followers of this traditional paradigm see the rules only as a means of resolving uncertainty or conflict resolution.   Traditional rules sets rarely have a strong proposition filter which tells you which propositions are legal.  They only have suggested tools for resolving propositions and some sort of table agreement, often unstated, for filtering propositions.   In play in the 1980s through mid 1990's this proposition filter was usually, "Is it realistic...", where 'realistic' meant very different things to different people.   What really mattered for these tables was how they were thinking about play, not the rules set they were using.   With the same rules set, they could have generated virtually any sort of play or any sort of transcript of play, simply by thinking about how to play differently and preparing for the game differently.One thing that I think 4e did do compared with traditional D&D was adopt the idea that it did need a proposition filter to say what 'moves' were legal to make in the game, rather than leaving that wide open and constrained (if at all) by unspoken table agreements.</blockquote>

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