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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5562138" data-attributes="member: 42582">Fictional positioningI think this is a matter of degree - and hence depends a bit on the comparison class. For example, your stealth example could play out much the same way in Runequest, Rolemaster or 3E.That said, I think you're perhaps a little hard on 4e here. To use stealth requires either cover, concealment or a distraction. So when the player says that his/her PC is going to use Stealth to sneak past the guard, the relevant cover, concealment or distraction has to be indicated, and there is a reasonable chance that that will help set up the next scene.I think that what you describe here is a poorly-played and adjudicated skill challenge, but it's hard to work out what the designers had in mind because the rules are pretty poorly written, and the examples illustrate features of the system that the rules don't expressly mention (for example, the sample of play in the Rules Compendium illustrates the GM determining the complication that results from a failed skill challenge on a purely metagame basis, rather than as the natural evolution of gameworld causal logic, but nowhere do the rules point out the need/desirability of the GM adjudicating in this sort of way).As best I can judge from the relevant passages in the PHB and DMG, the idea is that the GM should resolve each check in turn, presenting the new ficitonal situation that results from success or failure at each attempted check. This reduces the problem of unrelated actions at least a bit, in my experience. What the rules don't give advice on is how the GM can help bring the situation to a culmination as the final checks start to be made - there is nothing analogous to the discussion of narrating action point gain/loss in the HeroWars rulebook, for example, and guidance has to be extracted from the samples of play.The books expressly state that the player should give some account of what his/her PC is doing, and if you take seriously that the unfolding situation has to be narrated than such an account will be a necessary input. I agree that the books don't do a very good job of explaining how this all might work.I think that these examples are best read as examples of the sorts of notes a GM might make to help run a skill challenge, with the "required skills" treated more as a "here's how I envisage this might play out" crib sheet, which will have to be departed from to a greater or lesser extent as the challenge is actually resolved. There is no doubt that this could have been better handled in the rulebooks.I'm not sure whether my experience here is different from yours, or whether your standards for engagement with the fiction (and the sort of engagement you might have experienced playing RQ, RM, AD&D, Traveller etc) are higher.I'm not sure what I would expect my players to do with vines. I know that they interact with furniture from time to time (including to gain cover based on vertical rather than horizontal considerations) - which means that they're treating the squiggles on my map as guides to the fictional content rather than the content per se. They fly up into trees (which on my maps are green squiggles), take advantage of slopes and drops, etc. In the last session, too, a Spirehorn Behemoth crashed through some houses (no one disputed my ruling that peasant huts aren't more than difficult terrain for a Huge Behemoth) and one of the players reminded me that the huts between his PC and the Behemoth, which on the drawing are an obstacle, don't block line of sight to the Huge monster or its rider.Maybe all this is in part because we use mostly abstract tokens (coloured pieces from old boardgames) rather than miniatures, and because my handdrawn maps aren't very good! So the physical reality of the props is very obviously not the situation with which the PCs are engaged.In the end, I can only report that for me, at least (and those of my players who have commented on it) it is a phenomenological thing - because the mechanics make it salient, the fictional geography seems more vibrant in 4e than in other games we've played. On the other hand, the physiology and facing of PCs and NPCs is less salient because the mechanics ignore it. For me, this is the lesson from the prone snake - prone is a condition that is on the cusp of incoherence in a game that doesn't care about facing or body shape (contrast RM or RQ, for example). But I don't feel the force of the generalisation from applying prone to a snake or ooze in an abstract fashion, to a general problem with fictional positioning.Yes and no. I don't think my players look to their sheets in 4e any more than in other games, but I do agree that their sheets are their first port of call. But at least in my experience I tend to find it is looking to their sheets to find resources to tackle the current fictional situation - so, for example, equipment (and not just magic items, but - for example - jars of wrestling oil that might be used to make the ground slippery and thereby enhance a force movement power) is one of the things they look at. I regard this as expressing a more general preference for deploying known resources than doing the additional cognitive work of building up a robust mental picture of the minutiae of the external environment (and probably also connects to a degree of actor or author stance by habit, rather than blurring into director stance). When the fiction of the external environment becomes as salient to the players as the fiction on their character sheets - for example, walls or furniture or pits or fires that they are dealing with in the course of their own round-by-round decision-making - then I find they will tend to engage with it more.Something like this is written into an encounter in a recent module (I think the frost-caverns one from the Monster Vault). My players occasionally do stuff with Intimidate (and Religion against Undead) but mostly for effects rather than damage.I agree with this to an extent, but I'm not sure it's a flaw. It depends, in part, on what parts of the fiction one has in mind.As I said, I agree that the character sheet is always the first go-to for my players when it comes to looking for resources to deploy. I think this is a natural consequence of a game that makes PC-build such a mechanically significant part of the game - players look to the resources that they have built into their PCs. But I don't think that this makes the fiction irrelevant, or even less relevant. Compare, for example, the player in my game playing the dwarven polearm fighter/warpriest of Moradin, to the typical player of a dwarven cleric/fighter going through White Plume Mountain. When it is time to proceed through the frictionless corridor, or to jump across the spikes of super-tetanus (? am I remembering properly) my player is probably more likely to look at his sheet first, than at taking doors of hinges and using them as surfboards. (In this respect, it is probably true that all 4e PCs are more like wizards in the old game, who always had their most reliable resources on their character sheets.)But the upside of this is that the typical action the PC takes is, in at least some respects, more expressive of the character that the player has built, and hence reinforces other elements of fictional positioning that player and GM can jointly build on as part of the game. When this PC uses his polearm to do something tricky in a situation, it reinforces one element of the fictional position in a way that doing clever stuff with the hanging vines is less likely to. So I'm not too fussed about how much attention the system makes my players pay to the vines per se.What I would like, though, is for the ranger with Acrobatics to pay more attention to the vines than he currently does! But I'm not sure if that's a system thing or a player thing - that is, I'm not able to judge whether my players who pay more attention to the fiction and use it to express things about their PCs are overcoming a system flaw, or are simply playing the game properly while the ranger player slacks off a bit (he is certainly the player least likely to be at the table at any given moment).In your posts at least I take this to go without saying!</blockquote>

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