As players using the 4E system you are implementing a pattern based on use of daily and encounter powers that are established on such frequency not for any narrative merit, but purely for "gamist" expediency.
The ability to hide the pattern does nothing to remove the pattern
I don't understand this. Speaking literally, an invisible visual pattern is in fact not a pattern at all.
Just before you clearly stated that you agreed there were patterns, but it wasn't important because the cycle of them was not frequent enough to notice. I point out that the players have already noticed the pattern so the cycle period isn't relevant and suddenly the pattern isn't there.
Also, your defense is built on the position that out of this vast list of power the reason a pattern can not be observed is that they are indistinguishable from one another. And, I'll admit, if in your games the daily powers are routinely unremarkable from at-wills then you probably won't observe a pattern. I will STILL be there because everyone at the table knows when a daily is use, it just won't be relevant.
As far as I can see here, you seem mostly to be discussing a pattern in the
gameplay - the use of dailies, encounters etc.
This is what the players know. On its own, it does not amount to a pattern in the fiction.
You also seem to be asserting that there will be patterns in the fiction - of greater or lesser damage, more or less impressive exploits, etc - that either will emerge over the course of play, or at least can be anticipated, in advance, by the players. I don't think that these patterns exist. In the case of the archer, that seems to me obviously true - it's simply not the case that once per encounter there will be an impressive hit (from Biting Volley) because sometimes the impressive hit comes from critting on a Twin Strike. Mutatis mutandis for the daily.
With a PC like the polearm fighter the gameplay is more complex, and both the resemblences and differences between the various powers - at-will, encounter, daily - more intricate. (This is part of what tends to make fighters more interesting PCs than archer rangers, at least in my view.) But the interactions are sufficiently complex and varied that I don't think there is a signficant pattern. For example, not every close burst power gets used every encounter (eg because for some reason or other the PC does not have multiple adjacent foes). Not every daily gets used every day. Some of the dailes don't always hit, or hit that many targets (and a daily damage + push does that hits only one target need not, in the fiction, look any different from a ceratin sort of use of Footwork Lure).
This is why I asked, upthread, for actual play, or at least actual build, examples. I mean, consider a PC whose at-will was (let's say) swing-and-push. Whose encounter power was (let's say) shift-and-strike. And whose daily powers was (let's say) fall-back-then-charge-back-in. Then perhaps these patterns would emerge in the fiction, because everything that the PC in question does, at a given level of mechanical frequency, is quite different from the things s/he does at a different level of mechanical frequency.
But how many PCs does this describe? The whole power+feat aspect of 4e pushes in favour of specialisation rather than diversity (I'm a pusher; I'm a shifter; I'm a charger; I'm not all three of those). Plus, my hypothetical PC has only one encounter power and one at-will. As PCs gain levels - about one every three or four sessions - they add new powers, or (at higher levels) swap powers, or (at any level) retrain powers. Plus add new feats (or retrain them). These considerations all tend to disrupt any patterns in the fiction.
There are obvious patterns in the gameplay. But I haven't experienced these patterns in the fiction.
no matter how well you disguise the unintelligent monsters just always happen to pick the CAGI fighter, you are telling a story that reflects the underlying pattern in gameplay.
Most of the time, actually, the monsters - intelligent or otherwise - don't pick the Come and Get It fighter. Indeed, they would like to avoid him. But he is a polearm specialist. His deftness with the polearm is inimitable (I think of him as a sort of dwarvish Jet Li). He picks them.
(If I had a Come and Get It fighter who specialised in the dagger, the story would have to be a bit different most of the time. I'm sure I'd cope, though.)
not having a pattern is a preferable option if the narrative is your ultimate objective and is not subject to gamist concerns. (Again, I'm not saying that your gamist focused activities are not 1,000 times more awesome than my narrative focused ones)
I'm not 100% sure how you're using "narrative" and "gamism" here. In Forge terms, as this and dozens of other threads I think have made pretty clear, my play is narrativist, not gamist.
As best I can interpret you , you seem to be saying that patterns at the level of gameplay, which can be disregarded in the fiction only by admitting a signficant
difference betwen what the players experience at the mechanical level, and what the PCs experience within the fiction, are inimical to your preferred playstyle.
If that
is what you're saying, I believe you. Because it would be utterly consistent with your apparently very strong simulationist (as I would call it, following Forge usage) priorities, as expressed in this and dozens of other threads. It would be consistent with your evinced distaste for non-Actor stances. It would be consistent with your desire to make the rules "invisible" in a certain sense (the relevant sense seems to be - invisible at the metagame level, because they are in fact just models of ingame causal processes - so a player rolling a die is not invisible per se, but is consistent with immersion because equated to the PC swinging his or her swordarm).
But this doesn't mean that there are patterns in
my fiction. The fiction in my game is not established solely on a simulationist basis, by reading off the mechanics. This is not "disguising" anything. It's not as if the gameworld is
really as a simulationist reading of the mechanics would suggest, but we quickly cover it up!
The point is made (in particular in relation to failed skill checks and attack rolls)
here:
Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates Narrativist play . . . It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too. . . It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens in tandem with the real-people statements.
The term I've used before is "pop-quiz" roleplaying. I've also called it the narrative being the slave of the mechanics. You are building a narrative that fits the mechanical obligations.
Yes.
I've given actual play examples in this thread. One that has been discussed a bit is when the player of the paladin decidied, without (as far as I can tell) leaving Actor stance in any psychological (as opposed to purely logical) sense, that the reason his PC turned from a frog back to a tiefling was because his goddess intervened.
You seem to think that because he made this decision abut the content of the fiction
not because the mechanics dictated it, but rather: (i) by drawing on what the mechanics permitted (ie I told him that his PC turned back, as the rules dictate); and (ii) by drawing on well-established genre and setting consideratins (ie his PC is a paladin of the god in question, and the god undoubledly does care about the paladin, and also undoubtedly has the capacity to work miracles of various sort); and (iii) because it expressed his conception of his character, and of his character's story and thematic place within the fiction; that the resulting narrative is in some sense inferior or shallow or unengaging. That's not my personal experience. Others who have tried narrative play might feel differently, though - there's no accounting for taste!
But anyway, you labelling this a "pop quiz" doesn't change the character of my experience at the table. Nor does you describing it as "the narrative being the slave of the mechanics" (which in any event I still don't understand - in 3E, the action resolution mechanics dictate the narrative - eg if I attack, and I hit, and I drop it to 0 hp, it is dead - unless the GM suspends the action resolution rules - which I call "cheating").
(And as an aside, I assume that you play with a "hit points as meat" model. Otherwise, how do you work out the difference, in the fiction, between an 8 hp wound against a dragon, and 8 hp wound against a high level PC with the same number of hp as the dragon, and an 8 hp wound against a 1HD orc? Not by way of pop-quiz, I assume!)
