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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6112657" data-attributes="member: 42582">These are nice points.I certainly think the stat/skill system - with skills detatched from stats, and so acting as semi-free descriptors - is the highlight of D&Dnext.Naturally it can be played in the vein of an RPG, for the same reason AD&D can - they're both RPGs!I guess 4e could be played as a miniatures combat game, but you'd have to ignore all the stuff about playing a character in a shared imagined fantasy world where fictional positioning matters to resolution (contra some of [MENTION=10021]kamikaze[/MENTION]Midget's stronger claims about the oddly-named wrought iron fence made of tigers). I could also ignore much the same stuff in AD&D and play it as a miniatures combat game! (From memory, it was called Chainmail.)Here are the highlights of that post, for me:In previous editions, NPCs used the same spellcasting classes as PCs, and even monsters' spells were drawn off the same list. . . In 4e, by contrast, a caster might be able to use a lore skill to get a rough idea of what an enemy mage might be capable of, but you're never sure, no matter how well you know the wizard's spell list.  One of my favorite moments DMing 4e was when the party was about to ambush an enemy mage.  They had fought him once before, but one player had been absent for that session, so he asked the others what the guy could do.  The response was "Well, he's a mage.  Last time we fought him, he used this black lightning sort of thing, and he could animate objects to attack us.  Other than that, though...well, he's a mage.  He could do anything."  It was great. . . There's just a lot of lore in 4e that I like. . . You look in the MM, and it gets a lot of slack for not including things like No. Appearing and Ecology info, and that's true.  The MM doesn't tell you a lot about goblins eating habits or their ratio of males to females.  Instead it talks about how hobgoblins used to have an empire where goblins and bugbears were their servants, and hints that that empire's fall was at least partially from Fey interference, and how many goblins hate the fey to this day.  It talks of goblin tendencies to tame and breed creatures like drakes and wolves, and even hints that in ancient times, hobgoblins may have flat out created goblins and bugbears for their own purposes. . . In 4e, characters started out with more hit points(something like 20-30, usually) and they had more ways, as a party, to combat being dead.  In addition, Save or Die just isn't in 4e. . . As a player, this is great for me.  I feel like I'm in much more control over whether my character lives or dies . . . As a DM, this has been great for me, because it allows me to adjust the lethality of a given encounter to more degrees . . . This feeds into the dynamic combat angle.  Fights in 4e tend to be flashy.  People are moving around the battlefield, often pushing and pulling each other around.  Terrain tends to be a big deal. . . [W]ith Encounter and Daily powers, I can put the pedal to the metal and really have the mechanics back me up when I decide it's time to go all out.  It's lame if my Fighter can't put any more effort toward going toe to toe with his arch-nemesis than he can with a random orc.I'd put all of that forward as key parts of the "4e feel", for me at least.That's a good list too! It fits my experience - and that's interesting, because a lot of the time we have different preferences about how to approach RPGing. So I think you've done a good job of capturing a pretty widespread and shared "4e feel".Depending on how a particular GM treated Charm Person, it may not - but it may, because some GMs treat Charm Person as something to be adjudicated, ad hoc and moment to moment by them - so what exactly it will achieve is not known to the player - whereas the effect of Tide of Iron is clear from the rules, and doesn't depend upon GM mediation or adjudication.Also, Tide of Iron is available to the players of non-magic-using PCs.I don't think the reflavouring that Nagol describes is central to the sort of narrative control that I'm interested in with 4e. It's nice that players are able to contribute colour, but on its own that's not all that special.A related phenomenon which is more significant is that the default assumption of 4e play is that the GM may not use colour to veto a player's use of a power, and hence the assumption is that, when a power is used, its colour must be narrated so as to fit the fact of its use, rather than presupposing its colour as already given and a constraint on its use. This isn't very important when it comes to Magic Missile, but can be relevant to Tide of Iron - when a fighter pushes an ogre with Tide of Iron the default assumption of 4e is not to say "Hey, that can't be possible, and ogre's too big to push" and rather is to say "OK, you moved that ogre with your shield, tell us how you did that."But when The Jester says "Narrative control is explicitly shared to a degree never before seen in D&D. Powers, both attack and utility, help to let the pcs define the game more than ever before. At the same time, the dm is expected to provide more exciting and fantastic terrain than in previous editions", I don't think about reflavouring. I think about the fact that players (I think when The Jester said "PCs" he misspoke) have resources - like powers, but also skills, and rituals, and action points - and the resolution mechanics that those resources fit into - which let them shape the play, and the outcomes of play, in a way that is less subject to GM fiat and adjudication at every point.Balesir summed it up well here, I think:This is what I understood The Jester to be getting at by referring to "narrative control". And it's what I think the poster on the WotC boards was getting at in referring to his/her fighter PC being able to "put the pedal to the metal when it's not just some random orce but his arch-nemesis".I hope I've captured the "more" at least a little bit.</blockquote>

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