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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7084767" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think a fairly typical manifestation of what you call "Uber Rational" play, and what I would probably call a species of "alienation" from the PC, is the idea that social interaction can all be handled by "the face" character - as if the fighter, the wizard etc go through life never having anything they want to say to another, never being moved, etc.One feature of the advisor scenario that I haven't paricularly called out, but that I think is rather significant as one sign or marker of how it was unfolding at the table, is that (i) the final check of the challenge is a social chec (to goad the advisor), and (ii) it is made by the player of the 10 CHA, no trained social skills, fighter/cleric. That is to say, the player is invested in the fiction, and cares about how the fictional position of his PC. He doesn't want his PC to just sit there looking gormless, the butt of the advisor's jibes, and so he (in character) speaks out.I have also seen this happen in combat eg the invoker/wizard charge an opponent wielding his Rod of Seven Parts. Because that is what expresses the motivations of the PC given the fictional position, even if - from a wargaming point of view - it is not the most rational of choices.An interseting feature of 4e, compared to (say) AD&D or BW, is that it tends to create a lot of space for these sorts of "irrational" action declarations because it is rather soft on players as far as consequences are concerned. I can imagine that for your ( [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s) concerns, that might make it a bit insipid. For me, it is a fairly nice reconciliation of my sentimentality (which wants the players to win) and my desire for the game to emphasis immersion in the fiction and the characters (which I feel it delivers, as per these examples I've given).Again, this made me think of some episodes of play I've experienced.In the OP game, after the discovery of the cursed black arrows (which some posters upthread characterised as what you have called "conceptual violence), there was a DoW between the mage PC and the wizard/assassin (assisted by the elven ronin). The mage lost, and so had to give up on his commitment to redeem his brother.In our MHRP game, after seeing Wolverine kill a defeated NPC in cold blood and thereby suffering significant emotional trauma, the same player - playing Nightcrawler - reached the 10 XP trigger for his religious milestone, and abandoned his religion. Which then required spending 5 XP to change out his Devout Catholic distinction. The character definintely changed as a result of those things.4e doesn't really allow for this sort of thing, because it's got no really effective PvP mechanics (even if the focus is just on combat, PvP combat in 4e is not going to play all that well for my purposes, because it won't leverage the mechanical features of the system that - again, for my purposes - make the system work, which depend on the various mechanical asymmetries between PCs and NPCs).</blockquote>

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