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="Nom" data-source="post: 4449141" data-attributes="member: 56980">Not trying to be picky, but this is, for me at least, old news.  I can't provide precise references, but in the stuff I've been reading and watching it's been abundantly clear for at least 6 months, and maybe a lot longer, than D&D 4E was about "game" and "imagination", and everything that implies from a design and priority viewpoint.But you're right in identifying it as a fundamental break between 3E and 4E.  4E is quite deliberately not about representing the gameworld; it's about resolving events with respect to its own framework and whatever story the players may choose to layer on top of that.  Any representational mapping between the mechanics and the gameworld is at the discretion of the players, though the rules do provide flavouring to get the process started.As such, the D&D 4E mechanical ruleset is more like a very broad version of Monopoly or Settlers of Catan than it is a wargame simulation.  And this is a natural and deliberate result given the design philosophies.But the other trick is that D&D 4E has two independent but parallel "rulesets".  There's the raw mechanics, and there's the story-game.  Unlike Monopoly or Settlers of Catan, D&D encourages you to leap off from the basic mechanics and invest the gameplay with your own personality and story.  This is indeed true of all editions.  But 4E differs from immediately prior editions by providing rules to calibrate the events in the story-world, rather than rules to evaluate them.  In that sense, it harks back to very early (mechanics-lite) editions of the game and then takes a different development path.  Not in remaining mechanics-lite, but by retaining and enforcing a distinction between the resolution mechanic and the activity the mechanic is resolving.2E -> 3E: can't we just model everything using one fundamental system?3E -> 4E: let's just use the resolution engine and leave the description up to the players.</blockquote>

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