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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5755907" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this. 4e needs much better advice (especially to the GM) on how to handle the story in light of the mechanics - at the moment, especially when you compare it to the terrific mechanical/tactical advice on encounter building.Thankfully, they were mistaken. But, once again, the rulebooks don't help out in the way they should.The anchor between mechanics and fiction is keywords. The flavour text at the top of a power is (in my view) really neither here nor there, but the keywords are crucial. So a deathlock wight or an enigma of vecna, when it pushes a PC with its fear effect, isn't literally pushing them: the forced movement corresponds to the PC fleeing out of fright. (That's what the fear keyword tells us.) Similarly, a fireball can set fire to a barn, but not freeze a puddle, while icy terrain is the opposite, because one does fire damage and the other cold damage.Unfortunately, the rulebooks only talk explicitly about the mechanics-to-mechanics roll of keywords, not their role as a bridge between mechanics and fiction. The only place I know of in the rules where this second role is mentioned is in the discussion of object damage.This is very interesting, because while I agree that 4e's advice/commentary could be a lot better, I thought that the way the game should be played was pretty obvious from how the mechanics were written. This is the first post I can think of where I've seen someone say not just that they don't like it, but that it wasn't clear. Yet more evidence that WotC writers need to steal more from better game manuals!Btw, I don't think you have to abandon actor stance. The player of the paladin in my game plays almost constantly in actor stance (although will talk about his PC in third person style during breaks in play), and can use metagame mechanics without breaking actor stance because he describes it in terms of what his PC ("I") am experiencing/seeing/doing. On the other hand, the player of the wizard said a few weeks ago that one thing he likes about 4e is that he can "play" his PC rather than "be" his PC, and he likes that - he said that, over the years, he has discovered that he prefers the "playing" to the "being" approach.I think part of why the game can support this is because it entangles its player resources with PC resources (in terms of powers, hit points etc) so different players can deploy those mechanics in different ways and with different attitues. I think that, at least in this way, 4e is pluralist rather than monistic in its approach to supporting playstyles. (As [MENTION=98255]Nemesis Destiny[/MENTION] said in post #127.)I couldn't XP your reply to my post, but wanted to respond just to this point.My game hasn't got to Epic tier yet, so I don't have the same sort of experience you're describing here. But what your post makes me think is that something was going wrong with the fiction - the mechanics were delivering a story about a group of heroic demigods scourging the Hells, but in the fiction the PCs weren't being conceived of in that way by the participants in the game (I also get this feeling from your comparison to Frodo - Frodo was not a demigod).I don't know if you read the latest <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4dnd/20111216" target="_blank">D&D Outsider</a>, but it talked about incorporating paragon paths and epic destinies into the fiction. This passage struck me in particular:Demonskin adept? Hey guys, you all saw me sewing together that cloak made of demon skins, ok? Because I need those. And totally had them.I was struck by this because one of the PCs in my game is a Demonskin Adept, and from 8th level on, every time the PCs would fight and beat demons, the player would make a point of mentioning his PC collecting the skins. And for all but one of the other PCs, there were events in play leading up to their paragon paths.I think the game needs the GM and players to work together to produce the fiction that the mechanics reflect. If the fiction just remains at the "adventurers raiding dungeons" level, or the fiction doesn't change to reflect the PCs as paragon and then epic figures in the world, then it won't work. (I don't know if this is how your game was - it's the vibe I got from your post, but of course I could be misunderstanding.)The whole point of narrativist game design - which is what 4e is influenced by in respect of the mechanics we're discussing - is to allow a story to emerge from play without collaborative storytelling. See the discussion <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">here</a>.</blockquote>

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