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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5428850" data-attributes="member: 42582">I largely agree with this. Paragon paths and epic destinies could help with this, but (i) they come too late in the PC's development, and (ii) there is very little advice to either players or GMs about how to integrate these aspects of the PC into the unfolding events of play.More generally, there is a tendency - certainly in the fanbase, at least as I read them on ENworld, but also in the way that rulebooks and adventures for 4e are written - to assume that because a certain outcome for a PC is guaranteed at the metagame level, it is unnecessary or redundant to address it in the fiction. Thus, to give one example: because every PC who gets to 21st level is guaranteed an epic destiny, it is often said or implied that being epic has no meaning in the gameworld. Whereas what a good rulebook would do would be to give the players and GM the advice they need to construct and run adventures from which PCs becoming epci is the natural outcome.Skill challenges raise a similar issue in relation to action resolution - how to order and narrate ingame events such that the outcome that the structure will deliver can be made to feel like a natural emergence from the ingame reality. But as far as I'm aware, the only bit of 4e rulestext that comes close to addressing this is the example of play for a skill challenge in the Rules Compendium - and because it is an example of play without any sophisticated commentary, you have to learn the lesson by osmosis. For example, we see the GM deciding that a failed Streetwise check attempting to identify building A, which also makes the 3rd failure for the challenge overall, leads to thugs who earlier had been Intimidated away coming out of building B to beat up the PCs. This is an example where there is a complete severing of the nexus between ingame causation and metagame causation, but the example doesn't even point this out - yet unless a GM becomes familiar with and skilled at this sort of ingame/metagame distinction, successful skill challenges can't be run.The contrast with the rules for a game like HeroQuest, which tackles all of this sort of stuff head on from the start, is pretty marked.This I don't agree with quite as much. Nothing in earlier D&D editions obliged you do do this sort of thing, and I remember GMing plenty of nameless, faceless Basic fighters (or not nameless, but with names like Kill 'Em Dead Quick).I think there is a difference, though, in that in earlier editions if you didn't work out this sort of stuff about your PC then your PC had no depth at all, whereas in 4e (and perhaps 3E - I'm not experienced enough to make a confident call) the inherent mechanical depth of a PC can act as a sort of substitute for fictional depth.Anyway, thanks for the interesting post. I'm a big fan of 4e, but over the past couple of months posts like this one have given me a better handle on why some people see it as mostly a skirmish game/dice rolling exercise.</blockquote>

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