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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5637795" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is stuff here that strikes me as a bit confused. For example, you suggest that the designers don't trust the PCs. But the PCs are just fictional beings - they can't do anything to anyone. Maybe you really meant the designers don't trust the players. But in that case, the players aren't "peering through a window" at other kids with better toys - because here you seem to be referring to an imputed contrast between PC and NPC abilities.If this apparent confusion between players and the fiction is removed, I'm not sure what's left. I don't see much, other than a typically simulationist concern that metagame considerations - about the effect that particular PC build rules, action resolution rules, etc will have on the nature and experience of play - is being allowed to trump a purist-as-system simulationist approach to desigining those mechanics.Which takes us back to a wellknown fact - that 4e does not support simulationist play especially well.There are some more detailed comments on the 4e mechanics, also, that I think are just mistaken.First, your comment that Baleful Polymorph lasts for only six seconds begs the question against other ways of resolving the mechanic. As I posted upthread, in my game - which is the only actual play report of Baleful Polymorph in this thread - the reason that the polymorph lasted only six seconds is because the PC's god turned him back. This is no different from an outcome in AD&D in which a PC is hit by Polymorph Other, and the player of the PC then makes a successful Divine Intervention roll. Absent that divine intervention, how long would the Baleful Polymorph last in my gameworld? I don't know - it's never come up - and so a fortiori you can't know.Second, a 4e table that uses page 42 is not "going at it solo". There are DC-setting guidelines. Damage guidelines. And, since wrecan wrote his online article, guidelines for conditions and for actions. It's nothing at all like writing an RPG mini-system. If you were right about this, then HeroQuest, with its pass/fail approach to DC-setting (ie set the DC based on pacing/drama considerations, and then retrofit the fictional situation to accomodate this) would require "houseruling" (to use The Alexandrian's term) every time a DC was set. But it doesn't. It just requires a GM who is able to read the suggested DC tables, and who is ready to narrate the fiction in real time rather than read it from a prepared sheet. Similarly for page 42 - this just requires players who are ready to engage the fiction outside the parameters of their power descriptions, and a GM who is able to read the suggested DC, damage and condition tables.Last (and probably least), magic carpets aren't prohibitively expensive per se. They're prohibitively expensive for PCs below mid-to-high paragon level. (I assume that 1st level PCs in 3E can't build a magic carpet.) A magic carpet riding wizard is actual a significant NPC in my current game, and has been present in the game since the PCs were 5th level or so.TL;DR: if you describe 4e play in a way that presupposes an approach to play - purist-for-system simulationism and disregarding the possibility of metagaming approaches to the mechanics, treating the situation of the PCs and of the players as indistinguishable, eschewing even a hint of author or director stance - then you will get a picture of the game as limited, confining and even incoherent. But what does this show? As far as I can see, nothing but what is already common knowledge - namely, that 4e does not support simulationist play and includes metagame mechanics that are intended to be used to exercise narrative control, rather than to dictate, without interpretation, the content of the fiction.It's also true that if you think that approaching the game in a "just in time", spontaneous narration fashion is hard, than you may not enjoy 4e. But not everyone finds this hard, let alone onerous. Yes, it's different from mapping and stocking and mechanically describing a dungeon. Yes, it's different for writing and then running an adventure path. That's part of the point.</blockquote>

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