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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5968597" data-attributes="member: 42582">This seems to presuppose a certain sort of gamist play. (I mean gamist in the Forge sense - "step on up".) Namely, it seems to presuppose play in which the goal of the players is to overcome the challenges - taking the form of encounters - that are posed to them by the GM.I personally don't think that 4e is all that well suited to this sort of play. (Between its scaling mechanics, it treasure acquisition mechanics, its XP mechanics, its encounter design guidelines, it pretty clearly works on the assumption that the players will overcome the challenges the GM poses for their PCs, and will steadily progress through the levels from the start of heroic to the end of epic.)And I don't think that AD&D 2nd ed professed to support gamist play (although at least some of its mechanics suggest otherwise) - it talked about "story", not "challenge".And some AD&D, 3E and even (I believe) 4e players play in a way that focuses to a significant extent on process simulation (via the mechanics) and/or world exploration (with the mechanics as the "physics" of the world)."Step on up" clearly is the sort of play Gygax talked about in his PHB and presupposed in the DMG. The Gygaxian "skilled player" has stepped on up and shown what s/he is made of.I think "step on up" is also a widespread approach to 3E play, although 3E also saw the rise of the Adventure Path (with PF being the new vehicle for the same sort of play), and Adventure Paths really only work if the players are pretty much guaranteed to overcome the pre-determined challenges.I play 4e drifted ever so slightly to a light narrativism (again, in the Forge sense - "Story Now" - the thematic content of my 4e game is very much the stock-standard stuff of heroic fantasy RPGing). [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] has explained very well on multiple occasions how 4e supports a "light gamism" where the "step on up" element isn't so much in "Will we or won't we win", but rather "Look at the deftness with which I can play my PC" and also "Look how many encounters we handled before we needed to take a rest." (The second you obviously can't do without longer term resources. The first is independent of it.)And some other posters, including LostSoul, have articulated what I think is a coherent conception of 4e as a high concept simulationist game (again in the Forge sense): the players are in a certain sense just along for the ride, as they get to find out what happens to their PCs on the long but ultimately glorious journey from Heroic to Epic. I suspect that quite a bit of 2nd ed play was like this, and many 2nd ed modules (as well as earlier modules like Dragonlance) seem to presuppose this sort of approach. I likewise suspect that a lot of Adventure Path play in 3E/PF is like this, too. And the Foreword to Moldvay Basic could also be read as promising this sort of play experience, even though (in my view) the mechanics are virtually incapable of delivering it (unless, just as 2nd ed encouraged, the GM fudges "in the interests of the story").The point of this long catalogue is to illustrate that there is a long tradition in D&D of non-gamist play, as well as varieties of gamism.In non-gamist play, the fact that PCs have abilities that can "subvert" encounters is not objectionable because it undermines the challenge. In some non-gamist play (eg process simuation and world exploration) it may not be objectionable at all. Light gamism of the sort Balesir enjoys may also be able to accomodate it, provided the dosage is limited (if not somewhat limited, it might lead to too many encounters being ended in that fashion and therefore not creating the space for more intricate forms of showing off). A certain sort of hard gamism might also be able to tolerate, or even embrace them, if the main goal of play is to build PCs capable of serially and systematically rendering the challenges that the GM throws up irrelevant. (I personally wouldn't find this very satisfying, but I get the sense that there may be some 3E players who like this sort of thing - it makes "build" very important.)Dragonlance-style story play doesn't like encounter-subverting abilities, I don't think, because they impede the story (the classic "Why didn't they just teleport to Mount Doom?" scenario). And I don't like them for my light narrativist play for a different reason, namely, they impede the GM's control over scene framing - and if the goal of play is to make the players make thematically interesting choices by confronting their PCs with urgent situations, you don't wan't the players to be able to just step their PCs out of those situations by using scene-reframing abilities.What does this mean for teleport, disintegrate etc? You can change your balance metric from the encounter to the adventure (whatever exactly that means) and your story-telling group still won't want them (no teleporting to Mount Doom!), your light narrativist group still won't want them (even if resources are balanced over the adventure, resource management is just a means to an end, and the GM should still be exercising authority over scene-framing) and your light gamists will want them carefully rationed (ie no mechanic that lets you use them at a pace of exactly one per encounter).Conversely, even if you keep your balance metric focused on the encounter, your hard gamist probably won't object to them, and your light gamist can probably tolerate them within the limits that I've mentioned.So I think it's not always helpful to frame design arguments, or argue for design linkages, within a particular approach to play. Particularly when there have even been whole editions which, via text or mechanics or widespread practices among their players, have prioritised other approaches to play.</blockquote>

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