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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4162181" data-attributes="member: 42582">QFT, although I'm not sure that "The Dying Earth" is really all that rules-light.Looking over Ron Edwards' essay "Gamism: Step On Up" I found this passage describing one of the similarities between Gamism and Narrativist play:It is this "casual negotiation", under constraints delivered by the action resolution (and other relevant) mechanics, which ensures the coherence of the gameworld without it being the case that the rules are phyiscs.I find this comment a little odd, for a few reasons.1) It's almost always been the case that it is optimal (from the NPCs' point of view) to swarm the PCs. D&D has always been about the GM (with a nod and a wink from the players) contriving in various ways that this not come about.2) The 5-minute rest is mainly a metagame contrivance, to allow the players to reset a certain list of options. If for some reason or other it is not going to work in your game (because, consistently with verisimilitude) it is impossible to introduce 5-minute rests, then the rule needs to be changed. (Just as one way to avoid the 15-minute adventuring day would be to reduce spell-recovery time, although this of course would introduce further intra-party balance complications.)3) The point of a number of features of the 4e mechanics appears to be to increase player (not PC, but player) control over the resolution of action in the game. Per-encounter powers are just one example of this. They are essentially metagame devices. It defeats their purpose if one assumes that they are part of the physics of the gameworld, and thus that the NPCs who populate the gameworld can plan and calculate taking them into account.An analogy would be this: in a game of Conan OGL, the NPCs won't take into account that a player might spend a Fate Point to save her PC from death. The point of spending the Fate Point is that the PC does not die, despite the situation appearing to the contrary to everyone in the gameworld, including the NPCs. It is a metagame, "plot immunity" mechanic, not a representation of the causal laws of the gameworld.Likewise with per-encounter powers: the "per-encounter" aspect is best interpreted as a metagame, director's stance mechanic (ie the player dictates that circumstances are now propitious, and the rules allow the player to do this once per 5-to10-minutes of ingame time). NPCs are already assumed to be doing their best to avoid exposing themselves to powerful attacks, and the use of the per-encounter power shows that they failed to do so.Why would one want to deliberately negate the gameplay point of these mechanics, by treating them as part of the mechanics of the gameworld (and thus have NPCs engage in such reasoning as "despite appearing dead, she might really be alive - I better decapitate her" or "once per 5 minutes certain people can twist luck and fortune in their favour, but only if they get a rest, so I better swarm them before they can take a quick break")?If you don't want to play a game with metagame mechanics, fine (RQ and RM2/RM classic are, IMO, great games). But why criticise a game that contains metagame mechanics for not delivering a metagame-free play experience? Or interpret those mechanics in some strange non-metagame fashion and then complain that the resultant simulation is wonky?</blockquote>

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