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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5732751" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6685059]LurkAway[/MENTION] - good questions!The player wanted to kill the NPC. The mechanical resolution was my idea. (I think this is how page 42 is envisaged as working, at least as written - the player frames a request in terms of the fiction, the GM takes lead responsibility for mechanical implementation).The same player, the first time his PC faced an undead creature, wanted to cow it by speaking a prayer to the Raven Queen. I resolved this as a Religion check - I can't remember the DC, but I remember that I staked combat advantage on a success against damage on a failure, either psychic, as his morale weakened, or necrotic as the undead got the advantage (I can't remember now which, because the check was a success and so the damage didn't come up).I've used a similar "stakes" approach for other page 42 stuff, especially involving that player, who likes to have his PC pray to the Raven Queen for all sorts of things. (Page 42 itself doesn't talk about staking damage, but healing surge loss is part of the skill challenge mechanics, and their are feats and powers that involve a type of staking - eg get a benefit but grant CA - so it seems a natural enough way of going.)I think that this would count as "out of bounds", but I don't count it as breaking the rules. I agree with you that the polymorph duration thing isn't the sort of thing Monte is talking about. And in 4e terms, it's not page 42 - it's "saying yes" to a player's narration of a game mechanical event that it would normally would be the GM's prerogative to narrate. (This is category (iii) of the three meanings of "saying yes" in 4e that I noted upthread.)But does Monte envisage the players having authority over the mechanical implementation of their ideas? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.I like the balance that 4e strikes here, but I'm sure it's not the only viable balance. Page 42 and its associated apparatus - damage expressions, DCs, action economy, etc - do two things, I think. First, they give the GM the necessary support to mechanically implement "out of bounds" thinking by players. Second, they give players the necessary assurance that going "out of bounds" won't just end up hosing them, which (in my experience, at least) can often be the case in an RPG with a heavy handed GM.So I agree it's about expectations, perceptions and what the GM is on board with. But I think the mechanical framing can help a lot with that, by offering support to all the participants to get the right sort of expectations. At least in my view, page 42 is a big step away from "mother may I".Your comment about adventure modules is on target, I think. A lot of 4e modules are written, to an extent at least, in a "page 42" vacuum. I think they contrast poorly, in this respect, with modules like (just to pick some examples) the Penumbra d20 modules from Atlas, the Eden Odyssey d20 modules, and the sample adventures at the back of the HeroWars GM's book - all of which contain various sorts of suggestions to the GM about the range of approaches players might take, and give suggestions on how the mechanics of the game might handle those approaches. What's good about this sort of stuff is that, even if the players do something else again, the GM has examples and ideas to make the improvising the mechanical resolution of out-of-bounds play easier than it otherwise would be.Some more recent WotC modules are better on this front. For example, Tomb of the Winter King (that comes with the Monster Vault) gives suggestions on how social skills can be used in combat to do "damage" to the Winter King (by demoralising him). It's a modest start, but it's a start nevertheless.Anyway, I hope this post goes a bit further in explaining why I think that good rules don't need to be broken (but can benefit from supplementation), and also why I think that 4e is not the fictional-positioning-killer that it is sometimes painted as (including by implication, I think, in Monte's column).</blockquote>

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