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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6205902" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, I would count all these as very high priorities.I think the most important for me is being able to push hard against the game. I am not much of a wargamer myself, but I want the mechanics to deliver immersion in the way I described upthread. Having to hold back in mechancial play completely undermines that. And the group that I GM has, over the years, contained two Australasian M:TG champions, a couple of guys who used to rule the local roost in PBM gaming, and others who are serious board- and wargamers. These are players for whom mechanics matter. If something's obviously broken we're all happy to talk about it out-of-play and look for a fix - or perhaps rebuild things to get it off the table - but during play we shouldn't have to hedge around the mechanics. We should be able to use them.Next is not running filler. Filler is, for me, the enemy of good gaming. And my conception of filler is pretty expansive. As I think I mentioned upthread, there are plenty of published "McGuffin Quest" adventures in which you could subsitute the Princess in the final room for the Artefact in the final room for the Evil Ritual that Must be Stopped in the final room, with nothing much in the rest of the adventure having to change. It's all just filler, to soak up playtime and allow level grinding until we get to the confrontation that actually matters.I want every encounter to matter. Now, my conception of "mattering" is pretty expansive, too. (I suspect more expansive than Ron Edwards' or Luke Crane's.) I ran a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?330383-Underdark-adventure-with-Demons-Beholders-Elementals-and-a-Hydra" target="_blank">pretty big beholder encounter</a> which really didn't have any direct thematic connection to the PCs. I was inspired by a picture (maybe the cover art from Dungeonscape?) and thought that something like that could really let the players show off their PCs' stuff. Showing off your stuff is part of default 4e play, I think, and for me it's a virtue of the system that it makes it very easy to build encounters that will let that take place. I wouldn't want every encounter (nor most encounters) to be like that, but from time to time they can be fun.On the site of decision-making, I really want the decisions made during action resolution to matter. Build decisions matter too, of course - for instance, they determine what resources a player will have to bring to bear, and help determine the goals and thematic payload of the PC - but they shouldn't, on their own, determine the outcomes of action resolution. (I want to revist this in another post picking up on @Manbercat's skill challenge.) Another form of "pre-play" decision-making I am less and less fond of is planning. I enjoy crossword puzzles as much as the next person, but I don't want RPG play to be like doing a crossword. I have found high-level Rolemaster and AD&D can both suffer from this very badly (I don't know about high level 3E, but I wouldn't be surprised) - all the intellectual effort is put into planning a spell load-out, a sequence of spell deployment, other aspects of logicstics and strategy - then we press "go" and it all unfurls pretty automatically with no serious decisions to be made until the dust clears and we commence our next round of planning.13th Age sets the regen on an encounter timer. So to get your result you'd then have to set conflicts on an encounter timer too - every 4 encounters would make up one-overarching "skill challenge" for that conflict.In my 4e game I use the fairly standard ad hoc methods to make regen less than fully automatic - ingame time pressure, the need for a success in a skill challenge to find a safe resting place, etc. I agree with you that the default (lack of) rules is a weakness in the system.</blockquote>

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