NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622161" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, as you know, I find less of worth in the essay than you do.For example, the essay appears to presuppose that a combat resolution mechanics that are complex and have a signficant metagame component are at odds with, or at best orthogonal, to player control over the narrative. Whereas in my experience with 4e, they are one principal source of player control over the narrative.If you didn't want to play a game in which combat is one of the principal focuses of conflict, and hence the combat mechanics one of the principal methods of resolving conflict, I don't think you'd choose 4e. (Not that it's non-combat resolution is shoddy - but if your focus was primarily on political or mercantile conflict, you'd have all this other combat-related stuff accreting to your character and your monsters that would not be relevant to your play.) The powers that the essay criticises are, in my experience, precisely the powers that facilitate the use of combat as a vehicle for expressing theme and resolving conflict.So the player of a paladin, by choosing valiant strike (a "dissociated" power, as I noted upthread, though at-will rather than daily), gets to ensure that his/her PC will be valiant.The GM, by placing a war devil, gets to ensure that at least one PC will be a foe of that devil who is besieged by devils.The resolution of the combat will reflect these choices made by player and GM.If I was a 4e designer wanting to emphasise this aspect of the game, I wouldn't be looking at mechanical changes (what's obviously missing are mechanically-expressed relationships - though some paragon paths approximate these - but introducing them would be a big deal, I think). I'd be looking at taking the discussion from Worlds and Monsters of the thematic significance of various sorts of monsters and planes, amping that up, and putting it into the core GMing guidelines. I really don't think that the game needs more mechanics at this point - it needs to do a better job of explaining, especially to GMs, how they can put what is there to work.Robin Laws' contribution to DMG2 attempted this to an extent, but in my view suffered from being cribbed almost entirely from the HeroQuest rules, without being adapted to the different mechanical context of 4e - and especially 4e combat, which (unlike skill challenges) has very little in common with HeroQuest action resolution.</blockquote>

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