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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5782050" data-attributes="member: 42582">Interesting.What sort of mechanics does the game use to stop this becoming a default "win" strategy (like the notorious spiked chain wielder in 3E)? I don't think D&D has ever been very good at handling this - unless you count the 4e encounter power approach as a "solution", but I would see it more as "dispensing with the issue in favour of a completely different approach".BW has a very interesting mechanic for regulating the use of Brawling to get advantages in combat, plus other similar "augment" strategies: namely, in order to advance their abilities, PCs must use them in challenges with a range of difficulties (incuding some of very hard or overwhelming difficulty), and so players have a metagame incentive not always to bring all their resources to bear.But while I think this is clever, it also effectively squashes gamist play when the crunch actually hits, because there's all these bigger picture concerns taking over.EDIT:A different thread - one of the current Vancian magic threads, either in this sub-forum or in "new horizons" - led me to reread Edwards' <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9" target="_blank">Fantasy Hearbreakers</a> essay. One thing he said there seems relevant to this therad:[E]ach of these games is alike regarding the act of role-playing itself. The point of play is being an adventurer who grows very powerful and might die at any time, and all context and judgment and outcomes are the exclusive province of this guy called the GM (or whatever), case closed. They precisely parallel what AD&D role-playing evolved into during the early 1980s. Each of these games is clearly written by a GM who would very much like all the players simply to shut up and play their characters without interfering with "what's really happening." They are Social Contract time bombs.A good gamist RPG has to avoid the "time bomb" thing. That is, it has to allow the Step on Up - and, perhaps, the competition as well - to emerge, and resolve itself, without engendering any more hard feelings than would result from playing a friendly hand of cards (to pick another social, low key competitive passtime).This involves a lot of moving parts - for example, fitting the game to the fiction in a way that works for everyone at the table without requiring the GM to get involved in a way that might suggest playing favourites. And handling the issue of "lose conditions" - what is the analogue, for a player whose PC dies, or fails to rescue the prisoner, or whatever, of dealing another hand? I think that, historically, D&D has handled some of these issues better than others, and has also handled them differently across editions.I would say, at least in part, because they haven't solved the design problems to which gamist play, and especially competitive gamist play, gives rise.</blockquote>

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