Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4441144" data-attributes="member: 1054">You are correct I'm misuing the term &quot;fourth wall&quot; -- I don't know of a word for &quot;Those Ed Wood moments when you see the cameras in the shot&quot;. Call it an &quot;Outtake moment&quot; -- when you see the actors acting and then suddenly they all break down laughing and drop character and sometimes switch accents. 4e, to my mind, goes out of its way to remind us, at all times, that it's a game. Economics is only one aspect. Power which ignore the nature of the target (why is a massive quadruped as easy to knock prone as a biped? And see the thread on &quot;Come and get it!&quot;) is (are?) another. Auto-scaling difficulties is a third. Marking is a great big huge throbbing fourth, probably the worst because it's such a major part of combat and so bloody impossible to rationalize. And so on. Any one individual thing can be argued about, debated, and picked to pieces, but the sum total of them puts a severe strain on suspension of disbelief. As a DM, my job is partially to narrate the mechanics, to turn the die rolls and hit points into flavorful descriptive text that makes the world come alive, and 4e constantly fights back. It works against me, rather than with me.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lizard, post: 4441144, member: 1054"] You are correct I'm misuing the term "fourth wall" -- I don't know of a word for "Those Ed Wood moments when you see the cameras in the shot". Call it an "Outtake moment" -- when you see the actors acting and then suddenly they all break down laughing and drop character and sometimes switch accents. 4e, to my mind, goes out of its way to remind us, at all times, that it's a game. Economics is only one aspect. Power which ignore the nature of the target (why is a massive quadruped as easy to knock prone as a biped? And see the thread on "Come and get it!") is (are?) another. Auto-scaling difficulties is a third. Marking is a great big huge throbbing fourth, probably the worst because it's such a major part of combat and so bloody impossible to rationalize. And so on. Any one individual thing can be argued about, debated, and picked to pieces, but the sum total of them puts a severe strain on suspension of disbelief. As a DM, my job is partially to narrate the mechanics, to turn the die rolls and hit points into flavorful descriptive text that makes the world come alive, and 4e constantly fights back. It works against me, rather than with me. [/QUOTE]

Verification