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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6310236" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know about [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION], but my response to your post was conditioned by the impression it gave me that you think that those who are playing 4e are not engaged in "imaginative, character-driven play".I have never seen more imaginative, character-driven play than I see in my 4e game. And the reason for that is fairly simple - namely, that p 42 (which is a shorthand label for level-relative DCs and damage expressions) gives D&D referees the same sorts of resources as GMs have in games like Fate, Marvel Heroic RP, HeroWars/Quest and the like, to "say yes" and then set difficulties and consequences at levels which will make the came keep ticking over at a good pace and a reasonable balance between successes and setbacks.This shifts the focus of play away from worrying about whether or not the players are being given a free lunch, and on to the significance of what happens - including crazy action declarations and their resolutions - within the fiction.I suspect it may have less than 4e, because the text of this sort that 4e had has been very widely derided. Rather than improvisation or imaginative play, I think it will emphasise referees making judgement calls over player action declarations.For instance, the 4e PHB (pp 179) and DMG (pp 73, 75) have the following text about improvisation/imaginative play:It’s up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face.                       **** When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this  . . . skill play a part in the challenge, go for it. . . . Always keep in mind that players can and will come up with ways to use skills you do not expect. Stay on your toes, and let whatever improvised skill uses they come up with guide the rewards and penalties you apply afterward. . . In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . t’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help . . . by using that skill. Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.I see this advice very often either completely disregarded, or (quite obviously wrongly) paraphrased as "A skill challenge is just an exercise in dice-rolling in which everyone rolls their best skill whether or not it makes sense."Generalising a bit: imaginative and improvisational play depends upon (i) using the agreed circumstances within the shared fiction as a constraint on what action declarations are possible, and (ii) assigning a difficulty to those action declarations that are possible and assigning a consequence to success or failure. 4e deals with (i) in part in the passages I have just quoted - ie it actively encourages players and GMs to draw upon the shared fiction in determining what is possible, and in part through it discussion of "tiers of play" (PHB pp 28-29, DMG pp 146-47) which, together with the more detailed flavour text of paragon paths and epic destiny, help establish an agreed sense of what the PCs can and can't do that is independent of the mechanics.  It deals with (ii) by way of p 42, by using level-based guidelines to set difficulties and consequences.D&Dnext, at least in the play test, does emphasise using the fictional situation as a guide to and constraint upon action resolution, but it does not have anything analogous to "tiers of play" to establish a shared sense of what is feasible for the PCs. The upshot seems to be that the players are dependent upon the GM's conception of what is feasible in order to make their action declarations. At least for my players, this is an impediment to declaring actions that don't already have an established mechanical framework for their resolution.As far as (ii) is concerned, D&Dnext relies upon bounded accuracy plus the GM's sense of the "objective" ingame situation to assign difficulties that are appropriate for the game. In this respect it resembles the design of Burning Wheel. But Burning Wheel has a lot of other mechanical features - especially its PC advancement rules and failure-narration rules - which mean that if the players think the GM has set the difficulties too high, they still will be reasonably happy to press on anyway. This is because they get advancement benefits when their PCs confront impossible odds, and the failure-narration rules emphasise "fail forward", so the player doesn't end up worse off in the game just because his/her PC has ended up worse off in the fiction. D&Dnext, at least in the playtest, lacked these sorts of ameliorative features.Therefore, for those groups who tended to find in the past that the players preferred clear mechanics rather than GM sympathy to their action declarations, I think the incentive structure of D&Dnext will push them back in that direction - reliance upon the solidity of the known rules.For those who like a freewheeling GMing style (whether as GMs or as players), I think they will find D&Dnext suits them well, because the GM is not constrained by p 42-style charts of level-appropriate numbers.But at least for me and those I game with, I don't think that D&Dnext will strongly support freewheeling players - whereas we find that 4e very much does.</blockquote>

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