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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4016113" data-attributes="member: 42582">PC power usage is the main way, in D&D, of a player controlling the narrative. But there are also APs, and the PoL conceits, which aren't PC powers. As long as it is the player who gets to choose whether or not to use a power, I don't see the need to distinguish things in the way your second sentence does.I'm not shocked to hear your view here. But as I said above, you don't need a special class of mechanics to redistribute narrative control. Second Wind does it, for example (by giving the player the ability to refresh his or her PC's main protagonism-guaranteeing resource, namely, hit points), although to the inattentive reader it is not distinguishable from Phantom Steed on the power list.Fair enough.Most of what Reynard has says on these points, I agree with. Yes, the GM has more sophisticated rules in 4e to set up a range of encounters. But their predictability/systematisation (compared especially to AD&D, and improved in this respect over 3E) combined with changes in expectations about when adversity will arise, I think empower players in the game.But I think 4e expects the GM to do very different things with this blank space from what AD&D did.What I had in mind is that the players, by deciding when to enter the GM-controlled area of the map, get to toggle adversity on or off. This is a big change from traditional D&D, which assumes the GM can launch an encounter at any time (eg AD&D 1st ed DMG had random city encounters).Note that at the start of this paragraph you have the players determining pacing, and at the end you have the GM doing it. I think the latter is true of 3E.Yes, per-encounter frees the GM up to launch encounters at any time (subject to the adversity-conditions I've noted above). But as abilities refresh, it makes little difference. The GM has lost the ability to wear down or overwhelm the PCs.Agreed. But in earlier versions of D&D the GM does much more than this, and with fewer constraints.I tend to assume that these things are determined by the group as a whole, when they decide what game to play.The fact that something is not mechanically expressed in the game system does not make it unimportant. What it does mean is that it won't be the focus of mechanically-mediated action resolution.So yes, 4e cheapens the mechanical significance, for PCs, of non-adventuring skills because it is being written as a game of heroic adventure. If you want a game that gives mechanics for building houses, D&D is not it. (Even RQ and RM really only handwave in the direction of what you are calling for, because they have no real mechanics for these non-combat skills to feed into.)But returning to the Pit Fiend, between skill checks and rituals (any number of which, presumably, the GM can add without changing his combat level and XP value) I'm sure there is ample mechanical scope to flesh out his or her role as a manipulator, controller of liches etc.No need to make the assumption. The most logical inference from everything we know is that the sort of rules you mock in your first quoted paragraph will be in the game.I agree that 4e is moving away from these ultra-simulationist approaches. I don't think that's the wrong direction for D&D to take, however.I'd say - can't always be trusted to know what the players want as well as the players do.</blockquote>

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