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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6069539" data-attributes="member: 42582">Why are they invisible? If they lead to increased hits/crits, then if the PCs were doing a statistical tally they would be visible over the medium-to-long run.But we assume that no such tally is being undertaken. Just as we assume the fighter is not conducting controlled experiments to see how often s/he can leap over a 100' cliff and survive.The daily power won't be used every day, for reasons such as: not every day has a fight on it; not every daily power is used every day. And in any event, who is keeping the tally?Exactly.You are choosing, here, to make the metagame visible within the ingame fiction. If you narrate your game so as to make the metagame overt within the fiction in this way, of course it will look stupid. That is not any sort of peculiarity of 4e, and of course is the whole premise for Order of the Stick (which is based on 3E, not 4e).Hence, most RPGers - at least, the ones I know - choose not to make the metagame overt within the fiction in this way. In my game, at least, while the players call for one another to make skill checks, the PCs don't - they just talk about doing things. While a player might say "I can't go in, I've only got 6 hp left" the PC doesn't talk about his/her hit points (or level, or attack bonus, or AC, or XP to next level, or any of the other metagame elements).Here is a dialogue of your style from 1st ed AD&D:Fighter: Wizard, we really need to be able to walk through dungeon walls. Why don't you learn Passwall from that scroll we found? Wizard: I tried, but I failed my "learn spells" roll. Fighter: . . . ?Gee, AD&D must be a pretty crappy game with all this inexplicable, "just because" metagame stuff! But wait, no one who played AD&D actually narrated events like that. The wizard said something like "I tried, but I couldn't understand it. I have to study it more [ie in the metagame, gain a level] before I have a chance of masterying it." And in your examples, the fighter in a decent game would say something like "I tried, but they're onto me" or "I'm doing my best!" or some other ingame explanation that leverages such relevant ingame factors as position, speed, exhaustion, skill etc.The PCs don't have to explain anything. The participants in the game - players and GM - have to narrate some fiction. Just as, in AD&D, some ficiton has to be narrated to explain why the wizard can't learn Passwall when the "learn spells" roll is failed. That's pretty much the essence of an RPG - narrating fiction that accommodates the outcomes generated by the mechanics. 4e just has a greater looseness of fit in this respect then a more simulationist ruleset (as [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] noted upthread).That's contentious in itself. Given that I regard hit points as predominantly a metagame resource, and given that every edition of D&D has balanced a fighter's greater hit points against a magic-user's spells, I think this sort of balance is inherent to D&D.If Fate Points are tolerable in the hands of all players, then I don't understand why they wouldn't be tolerable in the hands of one player. And if Fate Points are tolerable in the hands of one player, then why wouldn't some sort of merger between Fate Points and PC resources be tolerable?A concrete example might be the 3E monk - we balance the monk by giving the player of the monk a 1x/day Fate Point (turn a miss into a hit, or a hit into a crit), and then attach it to Flurry of Blows - when flurrying, 1x/day the player of the monk may turn a miss into a hit, or a hit into a crit.If Fate Points are tolerable at all, I don't see how that particular ability is not tolerable. And what that ability is, in effect, is a 4e-style daily power. The player choosing to use that power rather than some other one is no different, as a play experience, from a player choosing to use a Fate Point at this particular juncture.Now if Fate Points are not tolerable at all, because of their metagame character, fine. I've played RPGs that eschew metagame altogether (classic Rolemaster or Runequest) and am familiar with the aesthetic. My point is that, if Fate Points are tolerable, than so should martial encounter and daily powers. They are no different. And using them to achieve parity of mechanical effectiveness between classes is no big deal, once the tolerability of Fate Points or similar metagame devices is permitted.Obviously not. But you were trying to argue that character sheets are not lists of player resources because when a character is passed from player to player, so is the sheet. And my point was that all this shows is that the resources attach to a player position, which may be passed from person to person in much the same way as a position in chess, or indeed any other institutionally-defind office.</blockquote>

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