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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5495282" data-attributes="member: 42582">Just adding to what eriktheguy said:At my table, Come and Get It causes no practical problems. The trickiest situation was when a group of goblin archers who were on a verandah around a hall had gone down some stairs at the back of said verandah. The PC fighter used Mighty Sprint (an encounter skill power) to barrel across the hall and up onto the verandah to where the goblins had gone downstairs, and then used Come and Get It to pull all the goblins to which he had line of effect back up the stairs so he could chop them. (He then spent an action point and followed up with Sweeping Blow (? - the 3rd level fighter close burst from the PHB) - all-in-all a bad round for the goblins.)I can't remember now exactly how we narrated the pull - it may have been along the lines of the pulled goblins thinking they had a chance to hold up the dwarf while their fellows (those outside line of effect) tried to escape. I think there was also something about the dwarf performing a feint of some sort, so it looked as if he was off-balance at the end of his sprint and hence vulnerable to the goblins - as it turned out, a rather successful feint!Anyway, the bottom line is that there is nothing absurd about a fantasy world in which (i) some archers are escaping down a narrow staircase and tunnel, but (ii) an enemy warrior arrives at the top of that staircase quicker than they had anticipated, and hence (iii) some of the archers turn around to try and stop the warrior while the rest keep running, and (iv) as it turns out the warrior far outclasses the archers and cuts them all down quick smart before going after the fleeing remainder.To map the mechanics onto this narrative, I think that two anti-simulationist manoeuvres are required.First, Come and Get It has to be understood as something like a token that the player of the fighter can play, which reads "Your enemies within 3 squares to which you have LoE make a tactically unwise decision, and/or fall victim to your deft feinting and manouevring". That is, it's a type of Unluck or Anti-fate point played by the player of the fighter against the GM's NPCs. What, exactly, the tactically unwise decision is, and/or what the PC's deftness consists in, has to be determined based on the overall context of the fiction at the time of playing the token. Because there are few limits to human (and goblin) unwisdom, and because the fighter PC in my game is a polearm fighter who specialises in melee control using other forced movement powers as well, in practice my table has generally not found it hard to come up with a story that combines enemy unwisdom and PC deftness in appropriate measure.I suppose were the fighter in question a dagger specialist, who had no other forced movement or similar control abilities, the narration might become more challenging - but is this a real problem for anyone, or only a hypothetical possibility?The second anti-simulationist manoeuvre required is this: everyone at the table has to be happy to accept that movement rules and rates, and rules for using standard actions to attack, do not represent or model the causal framework of the gameworld, but rather are a method of distributing narrative control among the participants in the game in a manner that respects the action economy of the game. The reason that this is important is that, without it, we cannot narrate pulling the goblins as the goblins closing in to try to hold of the fighter while their friends escape. This is because, were the action rules interpreted in a simulationist fashion, then (i) the goblins would have no movement left, and so couldn't close under their own steam - something else (such as a magical teleport) would have to supply the energy to move them - and (ii) the goblins would know that they had no attacks left, and so would have no practical way of holding off the fighter other than by interposing their (rather small) bodies.Of these two anti-simulationist manoeuvres, I think that 4e is the first version of D&D to invovle the first manoeuvre on any sort of widespread scale. I think the second sort of manoeuvre - a non-simulationist reading of the games turn structure and action economy - was probably present to some extent in AD&D (although the approach in actual play probably varied tremendously from table to table) but seems to have been largely absent in 3E play (even though, I suspect, there is text in the 3E PHB about the action and turn structure being abstract).Just to finish: once we recognise that the movement part of the action economy is also somewhat abstract and part of the rationing of narrative control, the diagonal issue becomes much less pressing (not that, in my view, it ever was). That a PC can move further when going diagonally across the map is no different from the fact that the PC can move further when some power is used that let's him or her shift or move out of turn, or when some enemy uses a power like Come and Get It that gets narrated as the PC moving under his or her own steam.</blockquote>

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