NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4223600" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe. I don't have enough experience to judge from. Given that failure, in D&D, tends to equal PC death, and given the complexity of building a new PC in 3E, I think there are some problems with the game facilitiating gamist play. 4e (judging from the high-level character build rules in the Paragon Path excerpt) seems better designed for this.This suggests that APs appeal to a type of simulationist play - namely, illusionism (with some of the choices I identified in my earlier post taking place within the overall pre-determined framework).Orthodox GNS takes the view that D&D is an incoherent tension between simulationism and gamism. Obviously, that's a big call to make about the most popular RPG. But if we drop the word "incoherent" and just focus on the tension, I think that AP play (and the sorts of threads it tends to generate) do demonstrate that the tension exists: too much gamism and the players break the plot - either at character build, by building broken or too wimply PCs, or in action resolution by killing the wrong things or getting killed too early - but too much simulationism and the players get restless and feel hamstrung by the GM.4e seems to me to have features that will alleviate some of the tension: changes to healing rules, more emphasis on power mix and tactical power play in action resolution, and so on all seem to offer the possibility of win/lose conditions other than TPK, which will then facilitate a mix of gamism at the encounter level with simulationism of the illusionist variety at the overall plot level.</blockquote>

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