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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5732546" data-attributes="member: 42582">Whereas I think that 4e does support "ignoring the rules" in certain circumstances - namely, via its approach to "say yes" - which is a bit of a mixture of (i) Vincent Baker-style "say yes" (ie only use the action resolution mechanics if there is a genuine conflict to be resolved), (ii) of scene-framing advice (ie don't worry about framing scenes in mechanical terms if nothing much is going to happen in them), and (iii) player narrative control. Both (i) and (ii) are about ignoring the action resolution rules when appropriate, and (iii) is about ignoring the standard, GM-centred world building rules.Page 42 isn't about ignoring the rules, it is about supplementing the rules to give game-mechanical significance to the fiction, which at least sometimes serves the purpose of circumvention (eg I am in situation X, and I don't have power Y which would let me get out of it, but I can do this improvised thing Z that hopefully will have the same result).One technique I use in my game, which combines a bit of "say yes" with a bit of page 42, is to allow "minionisation" of NPCs/monsters in circumstances where there is no larger conflict at stake. This has come up twice, so far. The first time, the PCs had just stopped an evil ritual, thereby triggering the classic temple collapse from the backlash of chaotic energy, and were fleeing. With them was a NPC who was half-rescuee, half-prisoner. As I was asking the players to explain what their PCs were doing to escape the collapsing temple, one of them - the player of the wizard - said that he wanted to take advantage of the confusion to kill the NPC with a Magic Missile. There was no reason to resolve this according to the normal combat mechanics - the single rescued NPC had no chance against even the wizard, let alone the combined power of the PC party - but I did think that some of the other players might want to intervene and stop the killing. I therefore had the player of the wizard roll an Arcana check - on a successful check (from memory, against a Hard difficulty) he could "minionise" the NPC and therefore auto-kill him with Magic Missile. On a failure, the NPC would keep his full allotment of hit points, and therefore survive a single Missile strike, giving the other players an opportunity to have their PCs step in if they wanted to. The Arcana check was a success, and the NPC dropped dead, much to the shock and horror of the other PCs (and their players).The second time, the PCs had captured a hobgoblin war behemoth and taken it to a city that was low on meat rations. The city was next to a small lake below a waterfall, and the players decided that their PCs would kill the behemoth by driving it over the falls (so it could then be butchered in order to feed the city). I ran this as a skill challenge, and one consequence of success on the challenge was that the behemoth was "minionised" and hence auto-killed by falling over the cliff. Again, there was little point in running the situation as a standard conflict - the PCs would have had no trouble taking down a single lower-level elite - but the chance of failure of minionisation did give the behemoth a chance to survive the fall, and therefore to do damage to the NPC townsfolk waiting below the cliff to rope and haul in the body, which would have been an interesting consequence of failure. Luckily, the players succeeded at the skill challenge and so the fall killed the behemoth, and so the NPCs waiting by the lake were safe.Anyway, that's my take on ignoring and supplementing/circumventing the rules within 4e. My general view is that when the rules of a game are well-designed, there shouldn't be much call to actually break them - that is, to set up a situation that brings them into play, and then ignore or change their deliverances. In 4e, for example, there should be little or no call to override the action economy, the rules for setting DCs and damage, and the like - these are all at the heart of the game's action resolution mechanics. I guess it in part depends what one thinks the action resolution mechanics are for - but when used in 4e's "say yes" style they're for delivering exciting and engaging fantasy heroics, and so to break them would be to opt out of exciting and engaging fantasy heroics, which seems a bit contrary to the point of playing the game. (Other games have action resolution mechanics aimed at somewhat different purposes, and in those games "breaking" the rules at least sometimes might make sense. I think AD&D is probably an example of such a game.)And because of the "looseness" of fit between mechanical resolution and fiction in 4e, there is no need (at least in my experience) to break the rules in order to give effect to the players' enagement with the fiction (via page 42, etc). You just have to follow the page 42 guidelines (as supplemented by terrain powers etc both in DMG2 and on the WotC site).</blockquote>

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