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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3999699" data-attributes="member: 42582">A possible option, but the mechanical experience is very different from the combat experience - in 3E the "social game" is much closer to the "trap game" than it is to the "combat game", in terms of the mechanical implementation, with little player skill involved in dealing with the relevant action resolution mechanics, and with a fairly low degree of integration between the mechanical resolution and the roleplaying experience (nothing analogous to the loving detail with which I can both build my fighting character and play out the experience of combat, drawing roleplaying pleasure from every round's decision-making).Thus I really am hoping that 4e will have social challenge rules that are comparable (obviously they won't be equal) in richness to the combat mechanics.But in fact the player doesn't need real tactical acumen (of the sort that real soldiers need, for example) but rather good mastery of the game rules and their implications. What a social challenge system does is mean that the same sort of mastery can be used to successfully play "talking" characters as well as "fighting" characters. I think this is a good payoff of such a system.To develop the tangent further, this will be a big difference between 4e and AD&D (I think 3E was somewhere in-between): in AD&D the sort of player who could play a Magic-User well, and enjoy playing such a PC, was very different from the sort of player who could play well, and enjoy, a Fighter. In 4e it seems that all the classes will draw on the same sort of system mastery, and hence all classes of a given role should deliver the same sort of mechanical enjoyment (at least in general terms). The different pleasures that they will provide will more pertain to idiosynchratic preferences as to which fiddly bits of which per-encounter abilities one prefers, or what sort of flavour one wants to explore.Again, I think this is an improvement. Just because in the gameworld Magic-Users are wiser and more patient than Fighters, it doesn't follow we have to design a game so only the very patient can enjoy playing a Magic-User successfully.Of course, others might disagree.Yes. The player is responsible for deciding their PC's actions: this means making the relevant mechanical choices within the framework of the game system, and (depending on how the playing group allocates tasks at the table) narrating/explaining those actions within the context of the gameworld.</blockquote>

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