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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5659540" data-attributes="member: 42582">I know Greyhawk fairly well. I own the 1st ed versions (both the gazzeteer and the boxed set), From the Ashes, the City of Greyhawk boxed set, the Sargent stuff (Iuz, City of Skulls, Fuyrondy and Nyrond), the later 2nd ed elements (Ruins, Adventure Begins, Return of the 8, etc), the 3rd ed Living Greyhawk volume and Castle Greyhawk supermodule, etc.I ran a Greyhawk game (using RM rather than AD&D as the system) from 1990 to 1997.If I was to run Greyhawk again, I would almost certainly try and get my group to adopt Burning Wheel as the system for doing so. One reason for that is that Greyahwk, in my view, doesn't come with the same built-in conflicts that 4e does. The Scarlet Brotherhood are cool martial-artist slavers, for example, with plenty of colour, but what sort of PC build is an enemy of their's right out of the box? I think BW's Belief mechanics would help add the "oomph" into the situation to really make the game go. At least as I have experienced it, 4e PC's have more "oomph" built into them simply via the mechanics, and as a result the situations come alive without the need for a Belief or similar mechanic to drive them forward. (In just the sort of way that Worlds and Monsters talks about.)OK. Should I infer from this that you don't play narrativist D&D?OK, so this is some indication of how you drift AD&D to get narrativsist Planescape. But what about the planes themselves? Isn't alignment inherent too them? Fair enough if you don't have the time. Between what I've read, what I've heard and what I own I personally think that I have a pretty good sense of Planescape, but you may be right that I'm mistaken. As no one (including you?) is actually claiming to have played narrativist Planescape, nor talking about what techniques were used, I guess it remains an unsettled question how much drifting would be required.For me, though, there is a bottom line. 4e is a different game from 3E. It has different PC build mechanics. It has different action resolution mechanics. It has a different approach to setting. It has a different approach to alignment. It has a different cosmology.One school of thought would be that none of these differences actually makes any difference to 4e's capacities as an RPG, except to make it less suitable for roleplaying than 3E.Another school of thought would be that these differences make 4e better suited to doing different things than was 3E (and earlier editions of D&D).I subscribe to the latter school. My subscription is based on my experience. And there are plenty of actual play reports, by me, on these forums, to illustrate what my experience consists in.I've never seen an actual play report from anyone explaining how they used 3E to run a narrativist game. Likewise for Planescape. In fact, as best I recall I've never even seen anyone assert that they were running narrativist Planescape or narrativist 3E. Absent such accounts, and based on my own knowledge of these various RPGs, my view is that they are not as well suited to narrativist play as is 4e. And this is precisely because of 4e's changes to rules and setting. I mean, I've looked at the other stuff, I can see the obstacles to narrativist play that aren't present in 4e (of which mechanical alignment is the most obvious, but just one), and I can see how 4e differs in those respects.It seems to matter to you that I have this view about 4e's particular suitability for narrativism, because every time I mention it you post to contradict me. But if you want to persuade me that I'm wrong, you're going to have to show me. It may well be, as you have suggested, this is just down to my preferences in genre tropes. But theorycrafting about how 3E or Planescape is no different from 4e in this regard isn't enough. Because I'm not working from theory, I'm working from actual play experience.</blockquote>

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