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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5300933" data-attributes="member: 996">Superficially, perhaps.  But myth and legend actually /did/ grow from our own world, and people seemed OK with their mighty heroes punching the tops of mountains, outrunning arrows, diverting rivers with their bare hands, and otherwise doing the flat-out impossible.  Why can't a fantasy setting have room in it's ill-defined 'natural laws' for impossible feats by sword-swingers as well as wand-wavers?That's just you aplying a double standard against the martial types, again.What I said was:  Try coming up with an example contrasting arcane and divine.  Try leave martial out of it while conveying your objections to 4e.   You insist it's not that you have anything against that source, yet it's the only one you seem able to muster an objection too.Simulationist explanations are a bit more exacting, I think, by their very nature.  And, I did opine that "anti-martialism" was a commonplace prejudice in the hobby, you're certainly not alone in wanting to aply this particular double-standard.Certainly, good DMing and restraint on the part of the players can make up for a bad system.  I'm not personally willing to cut a system any slack for being fixable by a sufficiently skilled DM, though.  Systems can be well or robustly balanced, or have a fragile balance about them, or be complete crap - that they can be house-ruled or otherwise compensated for doesn't make a crap system not crap.My point exactly.  You can have a simulationist game without having to base any of it on RL.  You can simulate a fantasy world in which mighty warriors routinely perform impossible feats - including somehow 'grabbing' a swarm, if you like.  If you want to look at the rules as the 'laws of physics' for the game world, then 4e models a world in which a lot of stuff that isn't possible in our world, is possible.  You could never 'grab' a swarm of bees (while, you could, if nabbed the queen, the rest would swarm around you - bad example - you could never grab school of piranha), but then you could never cast a fireball, or turn undead (even if you could find some undead to turn), or transform into an aspect of the primal beast.I'm really hearing two things from you.  One is:  I'm harbor no prejudice against martial characters, I just think they should be restricted from doing things the rules say they can, while all other power sources get the full benefits of the abilities the rules give them.The other is:  I don't like 4e being so narativist, I'd prefer it be simulationist.  Well, to the second:  consider that 4e may be simulating naratives.  No, really, fantasy novels, action flicks, mythic epics - they're all narratives.As for the first, I'm really not being fair.  In our society today, charges of 'prejudice' are easy to make and hard to wriggle free of.  I'd really like to be able to just drop that aspect of the discussion.  So, why don't we keep discussing the narrative/simulationist aspect of it, but just leave the poor beleaguered martial power source completely out of it?</blockquote>

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