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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6098251" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, it seems clever for a while, but the 20th time you see someone pulling the same trick with an AD&D spell loophole it is just like "yawn, did that back 78, try harder." What I see in 4e is generally more focus on the narrative where there really aren't the number of munchkin type things going on or the repetition of the same tactics and items again and again. You CAN have players sticking to powers, but as soon as I push my 4e players they're working out some clever narrative solution and I'm just slapping the easy-to-apply general rules. THEN if it doesn't give quite the right result, I just rule on it.  Yeah, my memory grows dim, we must have been playing DQ in the early 80's. I remember my necromancer character, but I don't recall how the class mechanics in general were arranged. I remember my PC couldn't do squat with weapons, and it took several months of play before his spells did more damage to the enemy than to himself, lol. I seem to recall a lot of the fighter types dying from critical misses too. Exactly how you got specific skills has fled my brain. I seem to recall that basically everything was roughly a 'skill', but I think the mechanics for say a spell and rowing a boat, and swinging a sword were all a BIT different. I suspect not a LOT different from 4e in a general sense, except you could combine different stuff more easily. Similar to what I remember of RM too, where you had a class but all it really did was control which skills you got for half price and again everything was basically a skill.Yeah, I think 4e got them about right. 3e was a horrible mess with like 40 different conditions that were usually far too specific. It was like "hmmm, would drinking 5 shots in 3 minutes make you nauseated, ill, confused, or all three..." Everything before 3e was in some ways worse. You had to just write a whole miniature subsystem for anything that had any sort of lingering effect. Often there would be 3 spells that do virtually the same thing and had entirely different rules for it.HOWEVER I think there re more choices than "story flows from mechanics" and "mechanics describe story". They can be equal partners, and story always flows ultimately from the players and DM, and mechanics can be created as needed too. Those are all things that 4e is about. Its SIMPLE to make up a mechanic in play because you have DCs, and page 42, and powers, and much guidance about this, plus skill challenges etc. which all provide very HIGH LEVEL multi-use tools. You can make an SC be about anything, any action a PC takes can be understood as an application of page 42, etc. Likewise there's nothing wrong with either building a bit of story around the mechanics of a power (reflavoring or extrapolating into the narrative) nor is there really anything wrong with just changing mechanics of a specific situation to make a better narrative. IMHO all these things were anticipated to happen in 4e and it does them all reasonably well.</blockquote>

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