Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5725872" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yep.I see this as relating to the vexed issue of 4e and fictional positioning.Some people take the view that 4e's action resolution mechanics can be applied without regard to fictional positioning, and thus that the game has a built-in tendency (or, at least, a capacity), to degenerate into a series of dice rolls. (Personally, I think that this is where the "board game" thing comes from. In a board game there is no fictional positioning.)But I don't agree with this claim. I think that 4e's action resolution mechanics do make the fiction relevant. On that same <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5635383-post854.html" target="_blank">"dissociated mechanics" thread</a>, I expressed some views about this.I think that skill challenges, as written obviously make fictional positioning important, becaue the GM has to frame the initial situation, and then reframe as part of each new skill roll (PHB p 259; DMG p 74):Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you [the player] face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks . . . You [the GM] describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results.I interpret the plurals here as distributed, not collective - ie after each description a player responds, makes a check, and a result is narrated which provides the new environment to which a player then responds - because the other reading - describe the environment, let the players make X checks without any connection to the fiction, then narrate the overall outcome of the challenge, (i) seems to produce a crappy game and (ii) is at odds with the examples of play that are found in the DMG and RC.Because of the role of the battlemat and tokens/minis, I think that the significance of fictional positioning in 4e combat is more contested. I think how 4e combat is experienced may depend a lot on whether, for any given group, the stuff that is drawn on the battlemap is first and foremost fictional stuff - trees, rubble, fog, walls with doors and windows, etc - or first and foremost mechanical stuff - cover, difficult terrain, obscuring terrain etc. Perhaps in part because my maps are fairly sketchy and my group uses board game tokens rather than miniatures or even WotC's picture tokens, I think that the fictional stuff prevails. And this is reinforced by the resolution of interactions with it that obviously involve fictionl positioning - treating the map as a guide to the fiction rather than just a mechanical artefact to be manipulated - like climbing walls, overturning furniture, opening or closing doors and shutters, etc.I also think that there are mechanical aspects of 4e action resolution that mandate the importance of fictional positioning - the rules on damaging objects, for example, make it clear that keywords (like fire, ice, teleportation etc) have fictional signficance. A tree can be set alight, for instance, but a stone pillar can't - so here we have ficitonal positioning that matters. Icy terrain can be used to cross a river, whereas a grasping vines spell that also creates difficult terrain probably can't. And so on.So I think that playing the game as just a series of dice rolls requres ignoring things like the signficance of keywords + fiction to action resolution that are expressly called out in the game rules.How common this is, I don't know. My gut feel would be that skill challenges and page 42 in the way I've talked about them in this post do not loom large in Encounters or Lair Assault. (I don't actually know, not having played either.) But my gut feel is also that these are best treated as degenerate cases of what the game can offer.Well, this is true of HeroWars/Quest also. And it is incorporated into The Dying Earth only somewhat indirectly, via the advancement rles.But in my view a game can mechanically support narrativist play without having the sorts of direct mechanics that I take you to be referring to (I'm thinking eg Burning Wheel Beliefs).Besides the example that I gave and that Nagol elucidated upthread, I think there is some more general features of 4e that support my preferred playstyle in a way that 3E (I think) wouldn't.First, at least in my view the game comes with a lot of built-in story elements, for both GMs and players, that make it easy to introduce thematic material into the game. Perhaps it is because I read the 4e monster books in light of Worlds and Monsters, but I find them richer than other monster books I'm familiar with, and I find also that more effort has been made by the designers to have that thematic richness actually emerge through the mechanical play. (Obviously there are exceptions, like Kruthiks and Bulettes. I don't use them.)Second, the game's action resolution is (in my experience) very forgiving of variations in player choice, meaning it tends not to funnel the players into mechanically optimal choices in the course of play. It leaves room for other considerations to matter.Third, and related, the action resolution mechanics themselves create "space" in play for things to happen. The absent of instakill combat resolution, combined with the dynamics of incombat healing, create space for the injection of material that (at least in my experience) tends not to be there in a game like Rolemaster, where (at mid- to high levels) getting off the first shot tends to be the overwhelming consideration in resolving a combat. And in skill challenges, the same "space" is created by the X before 3 mechanic - the GM has to keep the encounter alive, by introducing new complications in response to player successes or player failures, and - at least in my experience - this leads to things happening in the fiction that don't happen in a less structured resolution system.Fourth, and also related, these "spaces" in action resolution create room to solve the fictional positioning issue, that I noted above, in another way - introduce thematic fictional content that matters to the resolution, by affecting both player choices, and NPC choices, and hence (in combat) who fights whom how, or (out of combat) the unfolding dynamics of a skill challenge.I know that none of this can be done so easily in Rolemaster, because the mechanics push against it. And the experience and knowledge that I do have of 3E suggest that it would resemble RM more than 4e in this respect.</blockquote>

Verification