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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8620438" data-attributes="member: 42582">Perhaps it's assumed that a game player can work out that an abyssal ghoul whose hunger is unending, and whose goal is to eat the living, is scratching and clawing and spitting and etc.That seems not to have been true in your case. It was true in [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s case and in my case - I never had trouble working out what an aura in a statblock corresponded to in the fiction. In one of the most recent 4e sessions I GMed a PC was fighting a hundred-handed one, which had an aura of autodamage (Avalanche of Blades). It wasn't ambiguous what was happening - the PC was being mauled by the hundred hands!I can only comment on my players.The way they deal with auras of damage is to take steps to reduce damage, which the game system offers to various degrees.They didn't complain when their PCs, shocked by the horrific visage of the wight, recoiled in terror.Deathlock Wights are not the first creatures in D&D to have fear effects, so I don't see why you would think they are especially egregious in this respect.What do you think the right distance should be?I just looked up the d20 SRD and saw that a 3E mummy's aura of despair causes a PC to be paralysed with fear for 1d4 rounds. Why not 1d6 rounds? Why not until the mummy is out of sight? How is that not a "backwards justification" for a power that manipulates action economy in a wargame?My point being that I am at a loss as to what your evaluative criteria are.Because she can only look in one direction at once?Because she can only look in one direction at once?The recharge is a pacing device. It's like limiting dragons to 3 breath weapons in AD&D, and having a 50/50 chance to breath or claw/claw/bite (MM p 30). Gameplay becomes boring if the same move gets made every turn. In the fiction, I imagine that the wight briefly reveals its true visage, like a revelatory glimpse in a horror film.So you say. Reading the stat block for that wight, and then running it in play, gave me a more vivid sense of the fiction than I ever had with any other wight encounter. I recently ran White Plume Mountain, which has wights in it. There was no sense of horror or undeath at all. They were just game pieces which the players dealt with via a successful turning check from the cleric.There is no difference in the fiction. And how would the game mechanics not be artificial? They are artifice. They're artifice in 5e, too.All "works" means here is that you enjoy it. Whereas for me it holds no interest as a RPG system. 4e "works", in the sense that it gives me vivid fiction and gonzo FRPGing, as I said effortlessly.The power of an Orc is not relative to anything. The statblock of an Orc is relative to what I want to do with it in the game. That is artifice. The stat block of 5e Orcs is artifice too.I don't know what the word "needed" is doing here.I don't know why you regard pacing as a comfort to the GM. In my experience, players also enjoy RPG experiences that are nicely paced.I also don't know what you mean by the "logic of the world". What is it about the logic of the Nentir Vale, or (in my case, given the setting that I used for my 4e game) the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, that tells us how many hit points or what attack bonus an Orc has? Answer: nothing. Those are not elements of a fiction. They are technical game devices.I'm not sure how you've become more of an expert on my decision-making processes than me!What actually happens is that I decide that I think a certain scenario or situation would be cool - for instance, my gnolls had a pack of hyenas with them; I thought a hobgoblin phalanx seemed pretty cool; I liked the idea of the PC falling through the Elemental Chaos and landing on a Githzerai training ground - and then I work out how to mechanically implement it, using the very robust suite of tools that the system provides me with: minions, swarms, defence-and-damage-by-level guidelines, etc.Often I can take a shortcut because a game designer has already done it for me, with a useful statblock in a rulebook or sourcebook.So what you're saying here is that you do the same thing I do when GMing 4e: you either take a stat block that a game designer has written for you, or write up your own. I don't get how that is effortless for you but not for me.This is confused.A fictional situation is The PCs encounter Torog. But to resolve that in a RPG I need a system. And most of the time, my RPGing preference mean a system which uses dice as part of its resolution process. So I need numbers for the dice to interact with. In D&D, we call that a stat block.As soon as I write up a stat block, I have levels and other constructs. Your 5e Monster Manual is full of them, just like my 4e MM is.If I was running a campaign like you describe, with PCs of vastly differing power levels, I wouldn't use 4e D&D. I would probably use Cortex+ Heroic.I'm not sure how that is supposed to prove that the fiction of my 4e game is incoherent because I used minions.I assume by "monsters" you mean "stat blocks".Do they? Here's something I sent to the players in my 4e game in late 2008 or early 2009, before our first session:Relationship Between Game Mechanics and Gameworld Unlike 3E or Rolemaster, a lot of the 4e mechanics work best if they are not treated as a literal model of what is going on in the gameworld. So keep in mind that the main thing the mechanics tell you is what, mechanically, you can have your PC do. What your PC’s actions actually mean in the gameworld is up to you to decide (in collaboration with the GM and the other players at the table). Some corollaries of this: Character Levels Levels for PCs, for NPCs and for monsters set the mechanical parameters for encounters. They don’t necessarily have any determinate meaning in the gameworld (eg in some encounters a given NPC might be implemented as an elite monster, and in other encounters – when the PCs are higher level – as a minion). As your PC gains levels, you certainly open up more character build space (more options for powers, more feats, etc). The only definite effect in the gameworld, however, is taking your paragon path and realising your epic destiny. How to handle the rest of it – is your PC becoming tougher, or more lucky, or not changing much at all in power level relative to the rest of the gameworld – is something that will have to come out in the course of play as the story of your PC unfolds. PC Rebuilding The rules for retraining, swapping in new powers, background feats etc, don’t have to be interpreted as literally meaning that your PC has forgotten how to do things or suddenly learned something new. Feel free to treat this as just emphasising a different aspect of your PC that was always there, but hadn’t yet come up in the course of play.So as you can see my 4e game did not rest on the premise that you state in your post.Monsters in my 4e game don't "change drastically gaining or losing abilities" either. You seem to be confusing stat blocks - a mechanical artifice - for fiction.I don't think you're in a position to tell me what the quality of the fiction was, or is, in my 4e game. My own view, not entirely modest, is closer to what this poster once said:If the players had had their PCs do different things, then the situations would have been different, and the resulting fiction different. That's fairly typical for a RPG.As to whether there is use in being clever, I don't know what you count as cleverness. I think I've seen some pretty clever play over the course of my GMing, in 4e as much as other systems. The PCs persuaded Yan-C-Bin to let them go, and to give them back their flying tower. That was pretty clever. They made friends with duergar and thereby were able to redeem captives who otherwise would have been enslaved. That seemed clever. In combats, they are always coming up with various combinations and interactions, mostly based around forced movement and condition infliction. That seems like reasonably clever play to me.If by "clever" you mean having your 5th level PCs clean out kobold lairs knowing that the kobolds can't hurt them much, well that was never a part of my 4e game. 4e isn't well-suited to that sort of thing: as the rulebooks (both PHB and DMG) exposition of the tiers of play makes clear, it's a game focused on heroes confronting challenges that only they can overcome; it's not a game of hardscrabble, down-on-their-luck adventurers wondering when it would make sense to move from the first to the second level of the dungeon as a target for looting. If I wanted to run that sort of game I'd use AD&D, Moldvay Basic or Torchbearer.</blockquote>

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