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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5982469" data-attributes="member: 42582">The three games I'm familiar with that satisfy your description are HERO, Maelstrom Storytelling and HeroWars/Quest. Many poeple like those games; others don't. But I've never seen anyone describe them as bland.Part of what makes them not bland is that, in a roleplaying game, colour matters. That's the difference between an RPG and a boardgame, at least as I understand it.This relates back to an earlier exchange we had about "fictional positioning". In 4e, a fighter's powers are martial. A wizard's powers are arcane. They are positioned differently in the fiction (and this is reflected, in 4e, via keywords). So, for example, a fighter can cut a tree in half with his/her axe - because it has the keyword [weapon]. A wizard can set a tree on fire with his/her fire spell - because it has the keyword [fire]. Conversely, an axe can't set things aflame (except, I guess, by the indirect manner of causing a spark of a rock). And a [fire] spell can't cut things down.Now if you play a game in which these differences in fictional position never come into play, it may be that you never notice the myriad differences between 4e fighters and 4e wizards. I assume that a lot of those who feel that 4e plays like a board game have had this sort of experience. And to them, I say: either change your game so that fictional positioning does matter; or find a different game! Because playing an RPG as a board game seems a waste of time to me.But if those players go to 3E, but keep running the same scenario, what change do they get? The only difference is that now the wizard uses daily resource mechanics, and the fighter doesn't. If the only way that fictional positioning matters in play is for purposes of resource management, you are playing the sort of game that [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] upthread has called "Greyhawking". That's a type of game that many D&D players have not been interested in at least since the 1980s (as shown by the popularity of Dragonlance, despite the fact that AD&D lacks the mechanics to make it a really viable game without massive amounts of GM force via railroading and fudging of mechanics).Of course, it may be that fictional positioning doesn't matter to you, but that avoiding metagame mechanics permits "immersion" - so even though the daily cycle for the 3E wizard and the at-will cycle for the 3E fighter never really comes into play, you can still grasp the difference between them because you imagine your wizard as being Turjan, memorising spells every day, and your fighter as being Conan, swing a sword at will. This is what [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] calls "illusionism" - projecting a fiction onto the experience that the mechanics don't themselves generate in play, but do hint at when projected via imagination onto the gameworld. There is no doubt that 4e won't support illusionism, and is in fact unrelentingly hostile to it, because of its plethora of transparently metagame mechanics.I personally want a game in which ficitonal positioning matters to action resolution (ie non-illusioninst in the above sense), which is not about Greyhawking, and which will deliver a heroic fantasy experience without the need to use GM force in action resolution. 4e does that job, in part because it gives me fighters and wizards who are balanced in their mechanical effectiveness yet occupy iconically different positions in the fiction.The difference that I find is that these terms are generally used by players who have had an experience in play to describe that experience. They are not used by those players to misdescribe the game elements used by others.The comparable term for 4e fighters would be "Vancian fighters" (although even that would be a little misleading, because unlike 4e wizards, fighters don't get to choose powers at the start of the day).If a poster says "I didn't like 4e because I felt that fighter daily powers played just like fighters with Vancian spells", be my guest! Go to town!What I object is a poster telling me that, in enjoying 4e fighters, I am enjoying fighters with spells. Which is a complete misdescription of my game experience. I've never suggested,for example, that those who don't have the 15 minute day actually do have it and haven't noticed. I believe them when they say that a certain mechanic doesn't, for them, deliver a certain experience. What I then go on to do (sometimes) is explain why the techniques they use (eg wandering monsters) aren't useful to me. The analogue of this would be someone who doesn't like the 4e power structure explaining why s/he doesn't like metagame mechanics, or why the recovery cycle for player resources also, for him/her, plays an important part in immersion.Which is fine, but doesn't require or even benefit from any prelude about "fighters with spells".</blockquote>

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