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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7891489" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know what you mean by approach the character. Do you mean think about the character's motivations? Do you mean think about how the character will achieve things as part of the action resolution process? Something else? [USER=7006]@DEFCON 1[/USER] seems to be asserting that, in 5e D&D, a free descriptor can be the main component of action resolution. If that claim was being made about HeroQuest revised, or about Fate, or even about Cortex+ Heroic, it might be plausible. Though even there there are limits - a player who builds a HQ revised character with the descriptor Best swordsman in the land but who puts a low rather than a high rating against it doesn't seem fully committed to the claim on behalf of his/her PC, and so one might expect some irony or self-realisation to result from play..But if I build a BW character with that Belief, who has  a 3 Agility and Speed and no ranks in sword, then my character is unlikely to actually realise that Belief and earn a persona for it in that particular fashion.I might earn Fate from that Belief with that character easily enough; and I might earn Persona from Embodiment or Mouldbreaker in which that Belief figures. But the BW rulebook itself has stipulated ranks for expertise, and tells us that an expert typicaly has exponent 5 ((I'm on p 15 of Revised, but the chart in Gold is the same).  So my Exp 0, Beginner's Luck sword fighter is objectively a deadly swordsman in the most literal sense of that phrase and hence is unlikely to present as such in play.An interesting feature of BW play, which Luke discusses in some detail in the Adventure Burner/Codex commentary, is that play can reveal a Belief to have a non-literal, non-anticipated or even ironic meaning. And that could happen here - my deadliness might turn out to be to myself, or my allies, or to have some other unexpected meaning in play. But I don't think that many D&D players are looking for that sort of experience, and I don't think that's what DEFCON 1 had in mind either.The player of a D&D PC is free to play the PC with the belief I am the greatest magician in the land, but I think there are very few D&D tables at which that belief can be realised if the PC is (in mechanical build) a low level champion fighter with no spell slots or other magical abilities.D&D has rather concrete mechanical elements of PC building that are connected to concept. This is most obvious in the magic rules, but is also a feature of other aspects of PC build. For instance, kobolds are set out in the MM as having certain attack and damage numbers; and nearly every D&D player knows that kobolds are at the bottom of the combat capability food chain. So a PC whose combat stats are no better than a kobold's is, ipso facto, not really getting very close mechanically to the concept of best swordsman in the land or even deadly swordsman.When <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/prince-valiant-rpg-played-a-session-today.652393/" target="_blank">my group started its Prince Valiant campaign</a>, one of the PCs was a 40 year old knight who (as per the player's description) had accomplished little. When the same group started a 4e D&D campaign several years earlier, one of the PCs (played by a different player) was a 40-something year old 1st level wizard.But the mechanics of Prince Valiant - not to mention the experience of playing that first session - made it clear that the PCs were not (for instance) the equal of Sir Lancelot, and indeed were not very strong knights. And the interaction of 4e mechanics and fiction (our campaign mostly just followed the default for this set out in the various Monster Manuals) made it clear that the 1st level PCs, while more puissant than a typical non-entity NPC, were not as potent as (say) the magician leader of the evil organisation they were opposing.Your post posits some sort of contrast between fiction of the world and narrative, on the one hand, and game mechanics/game purposes on the other. I don't understand what the contrast is meant to be, because I don't see how the fiction and narrative are independent of the outcomes of action resolution which (typically) are determined by application of the action resolution mechanics. This is what @AbdulAlhazed is getting at when he asks about the self-described best swordsman in the land being easily taken down by a town guard (or typical orc warrior, or whatever).4e is the version of D&D that went furthest in allowing a player's conception of his/her PC to be realised without worrying about how (say) a typical town guard or typical orc thug might prove it wrong, because of its tendency not to stat up non-entities, its use of minion rules, its clearly articulated tiers of play and the associated fiction, and other well-known though widely despised features. 5e has less of all this, and is more insistent in its design that a certain mechanical element (eg +2 to hit, 15 AC, etc) correlates to something rather concrete in the fiction.And 5e is also much more concrete than 4e in respect of magic. To me it is rather striking that you set out your thesis by reference to the best swordsman in the land rather than the best wizard in the land or the best planeswalker in the land.</blockquote>

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