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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6066016" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks. I won't be reproducing the quote in the version I submit for publication, but in the context of a short presentation it did the job of (i) getting people's attention (by mid-morning of day 2 of a workshop audiences can begin to drop off a bit), and (ii) colourfully conveying the basic idea and implications of the position I was putting forward.I don't want to break board rules, but wanted to pick up a little bit on this.As best I can tell from my limited research into the topic, REH was pretty virulently racist even by the standards of mainstream, white, between-the-wars America. And that comes through in at least some of his stories. But I tend to find that, in the best ones at least, there are enough other ideas that are interesting that I can more-or-less bracket the racial politics. (Tolkien is very different from REH, but I perform the same bracketing there too.)I actually find HPL's racism harder to cope with (I'm thinking of, say, the Call of Cthulhu short story), in part because (contrary to widespread opinion) I find his writing and ideas less interesting, and in part because the non-fantasy setting makes the racism bite deeper and harder to bracket.Not addressed to me, but I thought I'd tackle it anyway!I think the game you could describe would risk bogging down in essentially pointless combats. This would not be inevitable, but would require a GM with a strong sense of pace and of improvisation, who was able to handle a variety of non-combat resolution on the fly (if you just freeform this stuff in 4e, then the plaing pieces become irrelevant, which would make the gamist building of them by the players merely pointless illusion). 4e gives the mechanics to handle this, but not the GMing advice.You might also want to toy with the short rest rules - make it half-an-hour or an hour, rather than 5 minutes, so that choosing to take a short rest interacts meaningfully with the wandering monster rules. This also makes it easier to run lighter, quicker encounters, which displace more of the game from 4e's default tactical context to a more classic-D&D-ish operational context. Unfortunately, the group would have to work this out for themselves because the 4e rulebooks don't talk about this sort of thing either.For XP rules, you'd use the Quest XP mechanics to replicate the "gold for XP" of classic D&D. Again, something that the rulebooks don't canvass.I don't think the game that I describe would leverage all of 4e's strengths (in particular, its tight - by D&D standards - integration of story and mecanical elements would be to some extent, at least, foregone). But I think it would be as playable as 3E or AD&D, and at low levels, once the GM found the right balance between encounter strength, short rest duration and wandering monster frequency, might get close to the breeziness of Moldvay Basic. (And that's not just conjecture - I'm drawing here on my own experience with running low-strength encounters against tapped-out PCs, which the game I'm describing would be aiming for as something like its default.)It's a pity the designers didn't write some of this fairly straightforward stuff into their books!</blockquote>

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