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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5634911" data-attributes="member: 54877">That 4E largely avoids problem X, which is very present in 3E, does not say that 4E is problem free.  It just says that 4E does a better job than 3E of handling X, out of the book.  Nor does the claim assume that what 4E did to get this better handling of X is all roses for everyone, all the time.  And in fact, some of what 4E changed that handles X so well does lead to different problems. But different problems are different problems.  3E has some system issues that, if they affect you, can only be solved via a combination of house rules and/or social contract avoidance of legal but troublesome behavior.  (Don't abuse fabricate, because if you do, we'll be forced to house rule your literal-minded abuse out of the game.)   4E, on the other hand, is trying to do two tough things at once: 1. Make the game, in its simplest but still complicated form, as accessible to beginners, especially beginner GMs, as possible.  2. Have a tight, well-integrated system for action adventure that sings in the right hands, with improvisation driving the narrative.   The problem is that the "social contract" for those two audiences is going to be extremely different, and the 4E advice largely fails to distinguish them.  That is, the problem in 4E related to this dicussion is not so much a problem in the rules as a problem in the advice on how to navigate house rules and/or the social contract. Nor should this be surprising.  In the tradition of D&D, people have been writing quite good advice for how to deal with things like fabricate since the first players got a glimmer at the wording of the spells or magic items.  Don't tell grandma how to suck eggs--she has it down, thanks!  4E takes away the problem that needs that advice, but then has made a freshman effort at explaining how you encourage people to improvise the narrative.  Gygax didn't perfectly cover all the bases on how to handle certain behaviors in 1E, either--though he was quite explicit that the DM would have to handle it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

Verification