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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4026565" data-attributes="member: 42582">I get the impression that the design intent is to facilitate gamist play, sacrificing simulationist-facilitating rules where necessary.But as others have noted before me, rules that facilitate gamist play can also (in certain circumstances, at least) facilitate narrativitist play. To what extent, and whether 4e rules are such, is being discussed on the Death of Simulation thread: I am moderately optimistic in this respect, Apoptosis and Skeptic are more doubtful.Which means that players' decisions about how to enage the gameworld are not hostage to the GM's decisions about the passage of time in the gameworld.Which means that players are not hostage to simulationist/worldbuidling constraints in constructing the pieces with which they wish to engage the gameworld. Narrativist play benefits from metagame mechanics at the character build stage, and 4e is providing them (whether they are the right sort of metagame mechanics is a little unclear at present, of course).This is not true, given that the Pit Fiend has both Bluff and Intimidate skill mods on its stat sheet. I gather that skills not relevant to engaging challenges (be they social, environmental, combat) are being reduced to handwaving - but I don't think that many people get emotional/social play excitement out of playing a crafting game. That sort of (simulationist) play sounds to me like the sort of thing a computer threatens to replace, by handling all the fiddly bits of craft checks and keeping one's accounts.This is potentially an issue, if it prevents players making individually authentic thematic statements - but at the moment there is no reason to suspect this, given what we are being told about the range of options in character build and action resolution.I don't know whether or not you've read W&M. My views about the impact of the PoL setting are based entirely on my reading of that book. And what it tells me is a couple of things: (i) in canonical PoL players have a significant degree of control over the incidence and character of adversity (I'm getting this from the sidebar on p 20, and the discussion of grey areas which I think is also on p 20) - this is a first for D&D, and greatly empowers players to do something different from computer gaming; (ii) PoL, by putting everyone on an equal footing with respect to backstory, significantly reduces the capacity of the GM or a well-read player to try to use superior knowledge of canon to control the narrative.Roughly, what you have there is a description of a heroic fantasy RPG. It is as true of HeroQuest or TRoS as it is true of 4e, but would anyone deny that those games don't facilitate a type of social/emotional play that is lacking in WoW?The key issue isn't that the game consists of heroic encounters refereed by a GM. The key issue is whether or not the resolution of those encounters - that is, the playing of the game, allows the players to engage in making a social or emotional statement. WoW does not permit this, because it does not give the players the right sort of control over the gameworld. 4e, by giving players a type of and degree of control over the gameworld (via the design features you have picked out above) that is unprecedented for D&D (at least since the early 1980s, anyway), seems like it may well permit this.I'm not expecting that 4e play will give us thematic engagement of the sort that would win a Nobel prize for literature. But it doesn't have to, in order to give something very different from the WoW experience that might help keep the game (and RPGs more generally) alive. My view is that simulationist gaming won't do that.</blockquote>

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