Well I won't because I can't. In the 4e game I GM there are 5 PCs:
*a dwarf fighter-cleric polearm melee controller, who is also pretty handy with his artefact mordenkrad Overhwelm;
*a drow chaos sorcerer who conjures up bursts of light, blasts of fire, and wind and thunder (and is able to fly on the winds he summons), who draws power from the Abyss via his cloaks of demonskin and the strange runes inscribed on his demonskins and the inside of his eyelids, who is also trained in drow jujutsu (monk multiclass to do damage in a burst after a hit, and an at-will melee basic attack with his off-hand dagger), and who is a member of a strange Corellon cult (and bears Corellon's divine boon);
*an angelic (deva) invoker who is the rebirth of a human wizard, a cultist of the Raven Queen, Ioun, Erathis and (perhaps) Venca, a master scholar and ritualist, and who can also conjure seering divine radiance - and whose ritual book is possessed by a Book Imp sent by Bane and Levistus to keep watch on him;
*a tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen, aQuesting Knight who is neither especially strong nor athletic, but whose strength of character and devotion is manifest - to both friends and enemies - in everything he does, and who, when combat comes, is able to strike with the strength of ten;
*an elven ranger-cleric, who bolsters his allies with healing and calls down the curse of the Raven Queen upon the enemies he hunts.
The only one of those PCs that I think could be built in 3E is the last one, and (unless there is some sort of cleric-archer Prestige Class in a splatbook that I haven't heard of) his clericism would be fairly weak.
The paladin couldn't be built in 3E, because it would need STR (to be able to make melee attacks - the 4e PC uses CHA), CHA to be a master of social interaction, INT and/or DEX to get feats that permit burst attacks (I'm thinking Whirlwind attack or somethign similar), plus INT to have enough skill points to develop Religion, Intimidate, Diplomacy and Sense Motive. I don't know if 3E has a Questing Knight prestige class at all.
The invoker in 3E would be a different PC altogether - an attacking cleric, probably wearing plate rather than hide, with buffs and heals on the side, and without the skill points or the spell list to be a scholar/ritualist. Maybe it could be built as a mystic theurge, but would still look very different. For example, a mystic theurge would not be viable in melee, whereas the invoker PC has decent AC (hide plus high INT) and melee training to wield the Sceptre of Erathis using basic attacks (and in the last session killed two opponents with OAs!).
The sorcerer can't be built in 3E. Leaving to one side the LA/ECL issues that arise from using a drow as a PC, there is the absence of elemental effects and at will magic, and there is nothing I'm aware of comparable to the Demonskin Adept, and the mechanical support that it provides for having runes of chaos inscribed on your eyelids (blind yourself and your opponent when you score a crit). Nor can a 3E sorcerer have a viable dagger or jujutsu attack. Nor is there anything in 3E that I'm aware of that supports out-of-combat actions like using a Cyclonic Vortex to gather chaotic energy leeching from a dead fire dragon into a single mass, in order to forge it into a Gift of Flame for oneself and a Fire Horn for the party (
see here for details).
The fighter can't be built in 3E either: the only melee controller build I'm familiar with from 3E is the spiked chain wielder. Which would be a completely different build (and not one proficient in two different weapons). And that's before you look at the cleric aspect, and how you would build that in (even three levels of cleric, which cost only 1 BAB, though a couple of feats, won't really compare to a 4e fighter/multi-class cleric/warpriest paragon path). Or the very great difference in play between 3E and 4e dwarves (the PC is built heavily around second wind as a minor action, for example, which plays into the feel of the PC as the undefeatable stalwart of the party).
I don't know if these are narrow concepts or not (I'm not sure what the comparison class is), but they are viable in 4e but not in 3E.
there is no 1:1 definite relation between a power and an event ingame. WHen you use power X, Y happens, but Y can also happen without X - the mechanical description is different, but the in-game situation may seem similar enough to make no difference to the character.
Yes. I've postd this before, but to little avail.
A further feature of 4e that underpins this is the mechanical encouragement it creates to a degree of specialistion - so the polearm fighter in my game, for example, has a variety of polearm feats, forced movement feats, forced movement items etc, which in combination mean that the consequences of his various encounter and at-will powers overlap in various ways, making any sort of 1:1 correlation between metagame (which power he used) in ingame effect (what actually happened in the fiction) pretty hard to establish.
The more I play the more I'm convinced that diversity-by-resource-mechanics makes the resource mechanics so focal that it actively decreases the diversity in the conceptual space.
I don't know if I completely agree with this, but it sounds plausible at least. My take on it, from my own experience would be: focusing on the resources can become the game in itself, and this is distracting from the fiction unless there is a very strong (process simulation) connetion between fiction and mechanics. Classic D&D tends to make this second thing true (with the exception of hit points). But the problem with that sort of tight mechanics-fiction correspondence is that the play of the game, and the fiction that is generated, very quickly falls into operational minutiae that I personally am not that interested in.
While the character does not know his hit points he knows his general state of being and that is expressed to the player in hit points.
That is true for a "hit points as meat" model. Is it true for "hit points as luck/divine grace"? How does a PC know how lucky s/he is going to be in forthcoming combats?
Most of the things about 4e that pemerton describes as Narrative I would describe as "Color".
That may well be true, but I'm not sure what follows from it. That my PC is grey-eyed or brown-eyed is colour, and in every RPG I can think of is
mere colour - it has no effect on action resolution or the shaping of the plot.
That my PC is beloved of the Raven Queen, or is a thrall of the Queen of Chaos, is also colour - but if I am able to leverage that fact in action resolution, to thereby shape the unfolding plot of the game, it is no longer
mere colour. It is significant fiction that in turn shapes the thematic tone of the game, as well as the detailed content of the fiction. Likewise PC colour that feeds into GM scene framing, which in turn establishes paramaters for conflict resolution, isn't
mere colour: it's the starting point for the basic cycle of narrativist play.
At least some of the colour in my game falls under the second paragraph and not the first. For example, that the dwarf PC is one of the greatest warpriests of Moradin is not mere colour. It played a key role in him being able to lead a team of dwarven artificers in reshaping the artefact Whelm in to Overwhelm.
That the wizard Malstaph was a cultist of the Raven Queen, and also a servant of Ioun and Erathis and Vecna, who had thwarted the emissaries of the devil Levistus and the servants of the god Bane, was not mere colour: it explained his return from death early in the campaign on a mission to find and wield the Scepter of Erathis (= the Rod of Seven Parts); it explained why the Sword of Kas hated him; and it explained why in his second rebirth as an invoker, Levistus sent a Book Imp back with him to ensure that he didn't cause further damage to Levsistus's attempts to thwart Asmodeus.
This is colour that feeds into the framing of situations, and the resolution of them. That's narrativist play - very light, hackneyed narrativism by avant-garde Forge standards, and pretty vanilla in terms of mechanical techniques - but still narrativism as I understand it.
I suspect you are correct that several of us run 4e in a very similar fashion. I would wager that we do not precisely map content/genre preferences across our spectrum but my guess would be that the "feel" of our games/tables could be mistaken for one another due to the congruency of our delivery of mechanical infrastructure.
Yes. I don't think we're talking clones here - just a generally consistent and overlapping reading of the 4e rules texts. (And I agree also with what you say about at least some of the authors/designers having a clear vision, and that coming through despite the fog.)
In one of my first 3e campaigns a druid and wizard used a combination of their abilities to assault a small fortress by riding an invisible flying whale as a siege engine (which I'm sure was buffed in several other ways). For us, it was a funny story, with the understanding that it wasn't going to be their SOP (the whale complained to the Druid that he didn't like it.) For other groups, this kind of thing can be a real problem.
Nice example!
Capes. Its a weird little supers rpg. All the characters start off
exactly balanced mechanically. It can do this, because the game is completely narrativist/abstract. The numerical values for traits only determine how well that trait can affect the dice which determine who has narrative control of goals and events in play.
I've heard of Capes but don't know any more of it than what you describe here. The mechanics sound a little bit like HeroWars/Quest - uniform method of resolution, with numbers on the PC sheet affecting die rolls based on the applicability of relevant descriptors. (It also sounds different in some important respects too, like a very differernt approach to scene-framing - HW/Q is more traditional in that respect.)
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