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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5756936" data-attributes="member: 42582">This response isn't meant at all as an objection to your view of the PF alchemist class. It's just an illustration of how there can be a different view of the role of mechanics, which is important to some if not many of those who like 4e, and which Monte Cook seems to be utterly disregarding in his columns (whether deliberately or out of ignorance).Almost no fantasy RPG let's a PC begin the game with an unlimited amount of money (eg as the first in line to a wealthy throne). There is no ingame rationale for this - no ingame rationale why an incredibly wealthy prince is never the protagonist. It's a metagame thing - to keep the power of PC's under control. And every fantasy RPG designed for ongoing campaign play tends to give advice of some form or other about the GM rationioning loot, even though such rationing is no part at all of the genre (eg Bilbo in The Hobbit).This is all familiar, metagame driven stuff. An alchemist who is not allowed to have more than X potions per day, or at one time, or whatever, for me would be the same thing. In the fiction, there is no such constraint - it's just that, for whatever reason, it never comes about that the alchemist has a larger number of potions (maybe every time s/he gets up to make another one the crystal ball rings and a new adventure is on!), just as it never comes about that the first level rogue finds the Mithril Coat, Sting and the Arkenstone.The general point is that, in some parts of character building, it is very common across a wide range of RPGs for their to be metagame limits that do not correspond to any ingame causal limit. 4e just extends this approach to other parts of the game, both character building and action resolutoin.(A subsidiary point: in 3E, a caster earns back those "little pieces of personal essence" by winning fights. I personally don't feel the realism, or the immersion, there - it's obviously a metagame thing - and I don't mind metagame elsewhere in the mechanics.)I tend to find that simulationist mechanics have a hard time with this sort of thing, although Runequest tries. One thing I like about 4e is that, in my experience so far, it handles it with ease.In The Plane Above this idea is developed under the rubric "Journeying into Deep Myth", which is very similar to the idea from Glorantha-based games of Heroquesting. I'm hoping for this to be a part of my campaign once it reaches epic tier.You don't mock the skeleton. You mock it's creator. Or Vecna (the god of undeath). Or the shadow magic that animates it and keeps it intact.So would I. You don't kill an ooze by mocking it. You kill an ooze by mocking Juiblex.I generally include story elements in my game based on need, and haven't personally felt any consistency issues.</blockquote>

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