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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8149415" data-attributes="member: 42582">My only extended venture into D&D in the last 20 years has been a 6+ year 4e campaign.In that game, I introduced a very modest degree of non=D&D tech: at the start of the campaign I asked each player to establish two features of PC background: one loyalty, and also a reason why the PC was ready to fight goblins.Beyond that, I relied on the features of 4e D&D that are able to do bear the load of conveying theme, concern etc. So not too many missing brothers or personal tales of revenge. Rather, a cosmologically-driven struggle over the nature and future of the Raven Queen, the defeat of Orcus, the liberation of the drow from Lolth so they could return to the surface of the earth, etc. 4e's tools are different from (say) BW's, but it has them: choice of race, to some extent choice of class (paladin does better work here than, say, archer-ranger), choice of additional non-class elements like paragon path and epic destiny, etc.In my experience it largely works. The tight structure around how XP are earned, the rate at which treasure is to be parcelled out as a component of PC build etc, all help: looked at at a sufficient level of abstraction they do the same sort of work on the GM side - for pacing, framing opposition, etc - as does the Doom Pool in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic.Now I think this raises questions about how replayable 4e is - how many times does one want to play variations on what I've just described? Or does one adapt the game to support a wider range of heroic/mythic/gonzo fantasy trope and theme? (That's my very high-level description of what [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has done.) But from my point of view, so what? Even if I never touch my 4e stuff again I probably paid less than $1 a day for it to get more than 6 years of great RPGing! Obviously WotC wants infinite replayability to be part of their marketing spiel, but that's a commercial problem for them and has no bearing on either my analysis of, or my play of, RPGs.</blockquote>

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