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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5760898" data-attributes="member: 42582">If it's bad taste to offer a serious answer, I apologise. But my serious answer is "No, you can't insult a green slime to death. But you can kill a green slime by viciously mocking the demon lord of slimes and all his work, including this particular green slime on the dungeon roof in front of you."Agreed on chess.And here I think you've isolated the point of controversy.Most of my replies are old hat - for which I apologise, but this whole discussion seems to a significant extent to be a rerun of past ones.First, the phrase "fiction nods to rules" - which Raven Crowking and BryonD have both used in the past - I find unhelpful. All versions of D&D involved rules which shape the fiction - for example, in Basic D&D and 1st ed AD&D, PC clerics never use swords or spears.More importantly, I find the analogy between the chess story, and 4e, completely unhelpful. Perhaps if a D&D campaign involved no action except for a solitary bard fighting only skeletons and oozes, than the analogy might get some purchases. Perhaps the story might come to seem contrived - although personally I would still want a bit more of an account of what the story involves. Some surprisingly interesting stories can be built out of contrived elements.But in fact the campaign will involved much more action than that - more PCs, more variation in foes, etc, etc. It's like Come and Get It and the wizard who is wrongfooted, or zigs when he should have zagged, or turns back just at the wrong moment - a campaign of this and nothing else might seem contrived, but in fact it is likely to be a one-off event.At which point, the case you seem to be making becomes something like an "in principle" case - along the lines of "A group of 4e players who play nothing but bards using Vicious Mockery to fight slimes and skeletons will end up having to tell a contrived fiction". And even if that is true, it tells us basically nothing about any actual 4e campaign, any actual episode of 4e play.As I posted way upthread (I think it was in this thread), no D&D game played by the rules will start with one of the PCs being a prince of tremedous wealth. This is not because there are no worthy stories to be told about such a protagonist; it is a metagame contrivance ("fiction following the rules"). But it is a balance-generated burden on storytelling that we've coped with for over 30 years. If every D&D campaign started with the PCs as nobles at court, but all needing some story to tell about why they had no great wealth, and all being unable to obtain wealth except by killing monsters in dungeons, the contrivance might be a harder one to cope with - but I've never heard of such a campaign being run. It's like the single bard vs slimes and skeletons campaign - merely imaginary. Or, rather, any group which did choose to run it would work out among themsevles how to elminate or adequately cope with the contrivance, such that the game would run fine for them. In which case, what's the problem?Nothing wrong with any of this. A question - do you play games like Runequest, Rolemaster, Chivalry and Sorcery, GURPS or HERO? They already go a lot further than 3E along the "realism" path.As was already mentioned upthread, there are biolgoical anomilies here, like flying dragons and non-feeble giants. Are these magic, or non-magical depatures from the physics of our universe?And in Tolkien there are economic anomolies. The Shire, an essentially autarkic community, has a material standard of living comparable to early industrial England, which was a centre of world trade and production. Is this magic, or a non-magical departure from the sociology of our universe?Games can break up over any number of things - poor GMing, crappy adventures, TPKs due to swingy combat mechanics, etc, etc. Is there any evidence that 4e is more prone to breaking up games than other systems?I think most people talking about "reskinning" have in mind page 55 of the 4e PHB:A power’s flavor text helps you understand what happens when you use a power and how you might describe it when you use it. You can alter this description as you like, to fit your own idea of what your power looks like.</blockquote>

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