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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4547223" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not 100% sure what you mean here by "explanation", but I think that the 4e rulebooks do not do a very good job of explaining how narration should be handled when playing 4e in order to maintain ingame verisimilitude (with the odd genre-legitimated deviation therefrom) while applying the game rules as written.There are hints, such as the comments in the PHB on reskinning powers, and the discussions in the DMG on p 42 (which suggests that the difficulty of a stunt should be set taking into account metagame as well as ingame considerations, namely, that you as GM want to encourage some sorts of stunts more than others) and in relation to skill challenges.But when you compare it to the discussion in the rulebooks for HeroWars/Quest, it's pretty minimal.I think one reason for that might be a certain hesitancy on the part of the designers to try and tell people how to play D&D, when it is a game aimed at such a broad market. I'm not sure myself that that's a good reason, but then I'm not the one responsible for making sure that 4e meets sales expectations.I do think it means that 4e fails at the goal of making system mastery unimportant - it's just that instead of mechanical system mastery, what is required is narrative system mastery, because the gamebooks don't come out and tell you what sorts of narration will work and what won't.</blockquote>