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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5623850" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not at all. Presumably  you're imagining and contributing to the fiction - saying where your PC is moving, who it is attacking, with what, etc.In 4e, the player of the thief who says "I use Trick Strike against X" is also contributing to the narrative - because s/he is now brining it about that her/his PC will engage, and be more likely to prevail, in a particularly showy duel with X. And subsequent play will bring this about in the fiction - eg the player will explain where her PC is shifting X to - which is part of the narrative.Which is why I disagree with the Alexandrian essay that 4e's martial daily powers are not narrative control powers.In my personal view, if nothing else ever turns on this - if X isn't, as an enemy of the PC, in some fashion integrated into the fiction in some deeper fashion, and if the PC being an impressive duelist doesn't ramify through the game in any deeper way - then it's probably not a game I'm that interested in playing. When those sorts of connections are in play - and nothing about 4e prevents them, and many aspects of it in my view encourage them - then I think that the narrative starts to have significant implications, direct and indirect, for future mechanical resolution, and either bigger implications for future encounter building by the GM.But even a narrative that is just confined to the drama of each individual combat, with no broader ramifications through the game, is still a narative - to which the player contributes in part by choosing when to use daily powers.Well, what you see as extrapolation I see as full contextualisation. After all, page 42 is a key part of 4e's combat resolution mechanics, so even standard combat actions take place under the shadow of page 42, and feed into it. And romances (or emnities, or whatever) are going to be central, presumably, to a lot of encounter set ups, and thereby provide the context in which it becomes meaningful for the players to makes choices about using their daily powers.There is a picture of 4e that is pushed fairly strongly in the Alexandrian's essay, which in my experience bears no relation to the way the game plays, or the way the rulebooks present the game. (The adventures published by WotC are, in most cases, a different matter.) Part of that picture is that 4e is a series of roleplaying-and-narrative-free skirmishs linked together by improv drama. This is what I'm disagreeing with.</blockquote>

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