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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5626228" data-attributes="member: 42582">You're making me be more self-conscious on this particular issue than I had been! (Which is a good thing, I think.)I think that, in this particular thread's discussion of whether or not mechanics contribute to, or lead players to contribute to the narrative, I have in mind the claim in the original essay - and reiterated upthread by Beginning of the End - that martial dailes in 4e are not narrative control mechanics, any more than making a move in a boardgame is a narrative control mechanic.I disagree with that contention, and my remarks about contribution to the narrative have been made by me in the context of that disagreement.So when considering whether or not a player's decision to use Trick Strike (for example) contributes to the narrative, I've been asking myself - By using Trick Strike, does a player make a difference to the story that is salient to the participants in the game? I think that the answer is, Yes.What would be a decision that is non-salient? Perhaps the player writes down on his or her character sheet that his/her PC's 10' pole has chocolate-colour swirls in its grain. Off the top of my head, I can't possibly imagine a situation in which this matters to the narrative of a D&D scenario (short of a GM including, as a favour to the player in question, a monster whose love in life is chocolate-swirl-grained wooden poles).Is using Trick Strike like that? I don't think so. It has an immediate and salient effect on the story, namely, of the PC rogue out-fencing some NPC or monster. (Or, if used against an ooze, of the rogue deftly luring the flesh-seeking beast now here, now there. Or whatever might be the case.) Sometimes this will be expressly articulated (the ooze case might call for this, depending on the table's expectations about how corner cases will be narrated). Often I imagine it won't - what is happening in the combat will speak for itself. Still, an immediate contribution to the narrative is being made.A longer term contribution is also being made, insofar as use of this power against this foe helps build up, over time, a certain persona for the rogue. S/he is the deft fencer, or skirmisher, or however it is that the table comes to see her. (In my own game, the fighter is the master of the polearm, who manipulates his foes here and there and cuts them all down with great sweeps of his halberd: footwork lure, passing attack, 3 encounter close bursts including Come and Get It (un-errata-ed at our table), and one or two daily close bursts as well. He, rather than the wizard, is the most obvious candidate for party battlefield controller.)Would a mechanical system in which these martial PCs got to do their schtick at random times as permitted by the dice, rather than when and where they choose to, undermine the ability of the player to contribute to the narrative in these ways? I think that it would. It would tend to leave the persona of the PC less under the control of the player and more at the mercy of the dice. Others might have different views and/or experiences.I like this post (but can't XP you yet). I have some sympathy for ThirdWizard's reply, that encounter design has a lot to answer for here, but I agree with you that that's not all that's going on.Upthread BryonD contrasted 4e's mechanics with an action point mechanic. I agree with the contrast (although not with all of the work that BryonD wants to do with it!), and in my reply to Bryon pointed out that one consequence of 4e's design is that a PC really exemplifes their persona. I've tried to get across the same idea in my discussion above about contributing to the narrative.What I think you do in your post is identify a way in which that feature of 4e can potentially come unstuck, because the player is suddenly deprived of the means of exemplification just when the fiction seems to call for them. And I think this issue can come up in 4e game play. But I think the game also has certain means of mitigating against it.Some of thse means come into play before and encounter. For example, the PC build rules encourage players to select magic items, feats and powers that overlap and synergise to a certain extent (eg if you have a feat that enhances forced movement, or psychic damage, then you will choose powers that deliver forced movement or deal psychic damage). This means that even if one power has been used, another power which is comparable in certain respects might still be available.Some of these means come into play as part of the action resolution rules. Action points are earned, for example, which - especially at Paragon tier - open up certain options in downstream encounters even as the use of daily powers closes them off.And page 42 is also relevant at the action resolution stage. It gives players a way to leverage the fictional details of a scene outside the scope of the powers that they have on their character sheets.But sometimes, yes, the story becomes one about how the expert, on this occasion, failed to rise to the challenge that his/her player has - through the way s/he has built and played that PC - posed for him/her. I don't have a view on whether this is just a flaw in the game, or whether it is a necessary consequence of having limited use (ie daily-style) powers, or whether it is in fact a virtue, because it builds a certain possibility of a certain sort of failure into the game.A pure action point mechanic, or a power point mechanic, would avoid the problem, but it would also lose the virtue that comes not just from spending points for bonuses, but actually building a PC who exemplifies a certain persona.I think I'm focusing mostly on (1), but trying to think about what (1) actually involves, not just through what is stated by a player at the moment of ininitiating a PC action, but also the way the resolution of the action ramifies through the shared fiction. With a power like Trick Strike I think this ramifying stuff is more important - what the player probably says is just at the moment of action declaration is "I use Trick Strike", which on its own is not all that rich, but there are then ongoing consequences at the table, which everyone playing the game is presumably engaging with, of the rogue toying with his/her foe, leading/driving it around the battlefield, etc. (In many 4e games this is probably represented visually via a battlemap of some sort, but not necessarily - certainly my group has resolved some simple combats without a battlemap, but not many that involve a lot of forced movement.)At least for me, it is this narrative that arises not because someone at the table expressly states it, but because it emerges out of the shared attention on action resolution, that makes up a lot of the substance of the game. And I think 4e's power design delivers a lot of this sort of stuff, often with all sorts of interesting and unexpected consequences.I think that your number (2) is sometimes important - especially for page 42 sort of stuff, and also if a table wants to know what's going on when the rogue Trick Strikes an ooze - but often can be glossed over. In the same way that 4e doesn't care particularly about facing most of the time (but does sometimes, such as when stealth is used out of combat) so it doesn't care about these sorts of details of bodily positioning and manoeuvring most of the time (but does sometimes, such as in some page 42 situations). [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] plays a 4e variant of his own devising that makes your number (2) stuff much more important: under LostSoul's rules, nubmer (2) narrations act as the triggers for martial encounter powers (which can be used at will as long as the triggering conditions are met). What is missing, here, is that I don't have any clear sense of why throwing purple stuffed teddybears pushes an enemy back 1 square. (Do they get a surprise?) It also seems a bit silly. Trick Strike I think makes it clearer what is going on - I'm doing clever footwork while fighting with my rapier - and seems more genre appropriate.At least for me, this links back to the idea of a PC's build playing an exemplifying role. What does having the power Purple Teddybear Strike tell me about the place of this PC in a (semi-)serious fantasy adventure fiction?There are some races and paragon paths I don't like, for similar reasons (eg I'm not a big warforged fan). If I had a player who wanted to play a warforge, or who wanted to refluff Blinding Barrage as Purple Teddybear Strike (the enemies are so fixated on the bears that they lose all track of their surroundings!), then I guess we'd have to work something out at the table.TL;DR on Purple Teddybear Strike - for me it's a practical issue, about taste and social contract, rather than a deep mechanical or conceptual issue. By the shadow of page 42 I mean that - at least with my players - when they're declaring actions for their PCs using their ordinary combat powers, they're also thinking about page 42 (and by "standard" I meant "ordinary", not "standard" in the sense of contrasting with "move" or "minor" or "free"). That is, they're thinking about ways in which they can exploit the environment, or ways in which it might affect themI think upthread I gave the example of the player who had his PC throw a flask of wrestling oil onto the ground to enhance his Footwork Lure slide, so that he could then get the benefit from his Polearm Momentum feat of knocking prone a foe whom he slides 2 or more squares. Another example involved the PCs fighting in a market square surrounded by shops and houses, while an enemy mage attacked them through an open, upper-storey window. The wizard PC teleport into the room behind the enemy mage (using Arcane Door) and then Thunderwaved her from behind, blasting her out the window (he failed the Arcana check that I'd set for having his spell have this additional effect, but not by much, and then when the attack itself was a crit the general mood at the table was that a failed check shouldn't be held against the player!).This feature of the action resolution mechanics, at least in my experience, helps keep the players engaged with the fiction, and encourages them to anchor their PCs' actions in the fiction - not necessarily at the level of granularity of "I feint towards his head and then strike at his groin as he raises his shield", but that aspect of the fiction doesn't particularly interest me (so I make no great effort to include it) and presumably doesn't especially interest my players (as they make no great effort to include it either).The rest of the stuff that didn't make sense was my reference to relationships (romances, enmities, etc) being central 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. What I had in mind, there, was that a GM who wants the narrative to matter, and who wants power use to contribute to the narrative, should be desiging situations so that they engage with the relationships and values that matter to the players (as expressed via their PCs) - so if your PCs worship the Raven Queen, you present them with undead and Orcus worshippers, or if they are tieflings you give them devils and dragonborn, or if they're drow you give them eladrin and spiders, etc - I hope the idea is pretty clear. This will mean that when the players decide how to resolve an encounter - including what sorts of powers to use against what or whom - it's not just generic tactical exercise #XYZ against generic foes A, B and C. The decision is part of that whole process of building up the PC as an exemplar, and realising the PC's persona through play. It helps build up a shared memory, among the players, of a campaign that they are invested in.For me as a GM, the biggest attraction of 4e is that it gives me tools - tools for mechanical balancing, and game elements that are rich in these sorts of thematic relationships, and very many and easy ways to combine the two sets of tools - that let me build just these sorts of encounters for my players. Which is why my experience with the game could not be further from the Alexandrian's description of improv drama linking tactical skirmishes whose main participants have funny names and occasionally chat among themselves in an epiphenomenal way. Which is, as I said above, what initially motivated my comments about contributing to the narrative. I don't know if I've obeyed this injunction or not (but I haven't deliberately ignored it). My impression of ENworld is that a majority (perhaps a sizeable majority) of posters have intuitions about mechanics that tend towards a purist-for-system orientation, but intended to support at least moderately gamist play (for some at the combat level, for some at the more operational/exploratory/Gygaxian level). Given that many of them also play D&D, they've somehow reconciled hit point mechanics with those preferences, in a whole host of ways.Given this, any reflection on play and play experience that is focused on the PC as exemplar, and on the contribution that action resolution mechanics make to the unfolding narrative of the game, might be wandering away from common gameplay.I had always assumed that the way I play RPGs was pretty typical of the mainstream, but the past few years' debate over 4e and related mechanical issues have made me doubt that assumption.</blockquote>

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