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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5983166" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed. What I would add is that 4e - between its default cosmology, its monsters, its terrain rules, etc - makes it easy to build these encounters and engage the players in them.Agreed also.In 4e that sort of thing would be resolved as a skill challenge.As to "realism", I think that is about fictional positioning, not about the "open" or "explicit" nature of the system. In 4e that is achieved especially via keywords.It is not part of the 4e rules that a power can do no more than what is express in its text. Page 42 and the DMG2 on skill challenges make this clear. For example, in Heroes of the Feywild there is a 15th level daily wizard power that (i) dominates the target, and (ii) removes the caster from play while that domination lasts. In the fiction, what happens is that the caster turns into smoke or mist and possesses the target. The wizard player in my game used this power to possess an NPC and then try and read his mind for a password - I resolved this as an Arcana check within the framework of a skill challenge.The constraints that 4e imposes, to stop this sort of thing being broken, is (i) the participants' shared logic of genre and story, and (ii) the skill challenge DCs and success/failure structure.I agree with this. The creativity I'm especially interested in is story/narrative creativity, and then the use of particular powers and abilities - singly or in combination - to produce these.I'm quite happy for my players to have metagame goals (ie author-level conceptions of what their PCs will be) as well as ingame goals for their PCs.As for "spiked chain trip fighters who are virtually unbeatable", I don't see how that relates to goals in any special way, although if it can be achieved in a way that doesn't relate to the fiction of the game it would seem to reflect poor mechanical game design. But I am happy for one of my players to have as his goal that his fighter-cleric become an Eternal Defender (epic destiny). And part of the conception of an Eternal Defender is that "[Y]ou stand in the forefront in times of danger, no matter how dire the foe... Ever more will you be the supreme standard for those on the front line of any battle." That is a goal of being a fighter who is virtually unbeatable. But in 4e, this is tightly integrated with the story elements of the game, and their progression via play.</blockquote>

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