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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5949225" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm wondering if by "narrative" you mean the same as what Campbell means by "narrative".Here's an earlier post by Campbell that captures my own experience with 4e:I think the comment about the need, if 4e is to work, for the participatns to remain focused on the fiction while they are engaging the combat mechanics, is correct. I think that many aspects of the game are designed to support this - both mechanical aspects, and story elements. But the support and integration is not as tight as, say, Burning Wheel (which is otherwise somewhat similar in linking narrativist play to mechanically intricate subsystems).One feature of 4e that distinguishes it, I think, from 3E is that if you don't remainn focused on the underlying fiction, the combat resolution mechanics won't give you much of an alternative default fiction. This is because of their well-known non-simulationist character (eg encounter powers, scaling DCs etc). In my view, this is why, for those groups who aren't interested in or don't maintain that focus on the underlying fiction, the game plays (as it is often put) "like a board game". Whereas in 3E, even if you don't care about the stakes of what is going on in the fiction, the more-or-less simulationist mechanics themselves still deliver some sort of surface-level fiction about who went where and tried what and stabbed whom.</blockquote>