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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5944198" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] - thanks for the XP comment. I wanted to add something to my session report that I think fits with what you were saying.Namely - how did I know that the dwarf shoving his hands into the forge was a Hard Endurance check, rather than just outright folly, even suicide?Unfortunately, the 4e rulebooks don't really answer this question. I answered it by drawing on advice in Robin Laws' revised HeroQuest rules - before setting a DC, you have to decide whether an action is possible, or not, based on the genre conventions in effect at the play table. So there is a type of social-contract-mediated, pre-mechanical stage to action resolution, before mechanics kick in. And that probably doesn't fit at all well with the "see the fiction through the eyes of its inhabitants" players.What they would want is a set of rules that specify the heat of the forge, the dwarf's hit points/DR etc - whereas how I did it was to think "Well, this guy is a 16th level warpriest who, last week, defeated a phalanx of hobgoblin warriors singlehandedly - when he prays and shoves his hands into the forge, it will hurt him, but he will be able to hold down Whelm." It was a pre-mechanical judgement call made by me as GM, drawing on the image of the character and his place in the world suggested by earlier events in the fiction, and I didn't feel I needed more mechanical detail to help me make it.The player certainly bought into it. He even used Figther's Grit (an encounter utility power that let's him ignore a range of adverse conditions) before shoving his hands in - for that I let him get +2 to the Endurance check.A common slogan/dichotomy used by the non-4e crowd is "story before rules", and they criticise 4e for going the other way. But I think that's too simplistic - it was the story that was driving my framing of the scene, my player's request to make an Endurance check, his use of Fighter's Grit to help, my adjudication of the outcome.My view is that the issue is not about the priority of mechanics to story, but about the correspondence between (i) the actual mechanical processes and decision points, and (ii) causation within the fictional gameworld. (That's not a view I came up with via my own observations. It's just a restatement of the Forge definition of simulationism, and especially purist-for system simulationism. But I think a lot of these debates bear it out.)</blockquote>

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