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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8411266" data-attributes="member: 16814">Oh, we're starting with a line by line fisking?  Every game does this.  5e absolutely bars play styles. So does any other edition of D&D.  Let's not pretend there's some freedom of play going on here in other D&D editions.What 4e does is remove a lot of avenues for GM Force -- which is the GM forcing an outcome on the game.  That does restrict a lot of play that features Force as a primary component, and many of the complaints about 4e are really about this feature of the system.  Being open and honest about this isn't something that I think is at all bad. It's the counter that other editions do it better, when they really don't.  If anything, 5e has fewer available approaches to play than 4e does, even with this restriction.  Is this a good thing?  Does it make 4e better?  No, that's silly.  It makes it different, and discussion of differences, honestly and openly, is how you can select a game that matches your preferences.  Trying to cast a game you don't like as worse because of these things is the harm, here, and exactly what you're trying to do.  Maybe just like what you like and stop bashing on things you don't?Maybe, sometimes, not necessarily.  This premise is flawed and isn't supported by your argument.  4e offers lots of narrative freedom, you just have to embrace it.  Does it allow the GM to Force things into the narrative they want?  Less so that other editions, for sure.  Does it allow the players to Force things into the narrative that they want?  More so that in other editions.  You've approached this from one side -- 4e actually allows players far more narrative freedoms than in other editions.4e doesn't limit anything like this.  Page 42 exists, as does the skill challenge frameworks which are extremely enabling of "out of the box" actions and efforts.  If all you're doing is saying that players can only press the buttons on their sheets, you've very much missed the point of the system.Playing on a grid has nothing to do with narrative freedoms.  And you can flex this easily enough, with less effort than adding in skill challenges to 5e takes.  I don't understand why you'll make numerous arguments that 5e is flexible because you can change the rules but then lock into this extremely narrow argument that insists you can't do such things with other systems.  It's weird.Easily, it enables approaches that other editions of D&D do not.  Yours appears to be a flawed understanding of play approaches that assumes that to allow different approaches you cannot remove others.  It's like saying that one way allows travel east and south, but another allows travel east, north, and west, but not south, that you have to say the second way can't offer more choices because it took away south from the first.  It's a silly argument.  Instead, these things are different.I can play 4e in a narrativist approach, or Story Now.  I cannot do this in 5e.  In return, 4e is less suited to trad styles because it restricts GM Force, which is a needed component to do these types of games.  But it doesn't eliminate trad approaches, it just curtails some of the sub-approaches within Trad.  Of course, Trad is the most popular way to play D&D these days, so if you're wedded to it as your primary way to play, then 4e will not feel good to you.  Perfectly fine.  However, I cannot flex 5e or other D&D systems into a narrativist approach within the system at all.  It's not a matter of it's more challenging, like 4e with Trad, but just not at all supported in any way.  Hence, 4e flexes to more diverse playstyles than 5e does.  Does this make 4e better?  Nope, makes it different -- it does different things.  Why this is so hotly contested I'm not really sure.Page 42 and the skill challenge system.  Use/run these with a narrative approach and you're off to the races with lots of player directed play.If you mean "I can narrate things how I want as GM" as your definition of narrative approach, then, well, we've found the issue and it's the one I identified earlier.You seem to badly misunderstand how skill challenges work.  Pretty normal, they were not well described in the early books.  But this is not how skill challenges work, and they most certainly do not restrict either creativity or roleplaying.Sure, you're welcome to that opinion.  Doesn't make it true.</blockquote>

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