Mearls' Legends and Lore (or, "All Roads Lead to Rome, Redux")

[BryonD]

Look, if you want to insult my GMing and tell me that I run a crappy game using a crappy ruleset, just come out and say it.

Hey Perm,

You are a great GM, running a great game using a fair to middlin ruleset.

 

[Raven Crowking]

As always happens in these threads, the goalpost keep getting moved and definitions keep changing to the point where no one can keep up with the silly "debate".

Don't mistake refining a position for shifting the goalposts.

If you examine the thread in context of the refined statement of position, I believe you will see that the side opposed to your own makes more sense than it might have previously seemed to.

Contrast this with the "superhuman" discussion, where the definitions of what is "superhuman" and "human" seem to shift quite often, and where earlier statements make no sense if you accept the later definitions.

Refinement is something that should be encouraged in a discussion, rather than seen as a problem. If, under the refined definition, you suddenly agree with the previous statements, then that is a win for everyone.

Shifting the goalposts is just about not facing (or not admitting) that an argument doesn't make sense.

It is, IMHO and IME, not at all uncommon for one party to phrase something poorly, thus leading to a lack of understanding and an apparent strong disagreement where there is little or no actual disagreement to begin with. I know this because, all too often, I am that one party (Proud to be a Game Master and the Village Idiot, you see).

I mean, I would be very happy to define the tent as "all rpgs", in which case it is a very big tent indeed.

But, in the case of WotC, "D&D is all a big tent with room for every edition!" rings false when they have limited access to earlier editions as far as they legally can. Likewise, "4e is a big tent with room for every playstyle!" rings false when one examines the designer commentary or what the edition actually does well.

AND, for the record, I think an edition not being a "big tent" is fine. It allows for a tighter focus, and a more uniform play experience from table to table. While the degree might be different, that was clearly one of Gygax's goals for AD&D 1e. It is not a priori bad.

On a tangent: Want to lead me to Rome, WotC? Release "Return to the Forbidden City" with a big (not mini-scale) poster map of the Forbidden City, and a ton of detailed locations as a mini-campaign setting. Done well, I'd pay a pretty penny for that boxed set, and I don't even play 4e!

Well, just think about it, okay?


RC

 

[pemerton]

Apparently the word "explain" escaped your notice there. Try again.

If multiple posts of multiple hundreds of words on this thread - including that amount of detail on the overland skill challenge - aren't adequate, why don't you go to some of the actual play threads I linked to upthread.

Hmmm... I had assumed, based on your praising quotations of Czege, that you were similarly shameless in your railroading, but apparently you feel great shame about it. Sorry about that.

If you can't tell the difference between what Czege describes and railroading, or in Edwards' terminology the differene between plot and situational authority, then I don't know what experience you're bringing to this, but I assume it doesn't include much familiarity with modern/indie RPGs.

The notion that Czege and Edwards are railroaders, or advocates of railroading, is too absurd for words. They're up there with Robin Laws and Vincent Baker as designers of player-focused RPGs.

As I said earlier, go to some of my actual play threads and tell me where the railroading is. As you'll see on those threads, I'm quite happy to talk in detail about the way I GM my games. It's not just theorycraft.

 

[BryonD]

If multiple posts of multiple hundreds of words on this thread - including that amount of detail on the overland skill challenge - aren't adequate, why don't you go to some of the actual play threads I linked to upthread.

If you can't tell the difference between what Czege describes and railroading, or in Edwards' terminology the differene between plot and situational authority, then I don't know what experience you're bringing to this, but I assume it doesn't include much familiarity with modern/indie RPGs.

The notion that Czege and Edwards are railroaders, or advocates of railroading, is too absurd for words. They're up there with Robin Laws and Vincent Baker as designers of player-focused RPGs.

As I said earlier, go to some of my actual play threads and tell me where the railroading is. As you'll see on those threads, I'm quite happy to talk in detail about the way I GM my games. It's not just theorycraft.

Heh

I'm very torn here. On the one hand I feel for you because I know just how frustrating it can be to explain something exhaustively, only to have someone first say they don't get what you are saying and then second to turn around and suggest that you have never explained it and you are therefore proven wrong if you don't start over from the beginning right now. That gets old fast and it really sucks.

On the other hand, I was pretty much going down that road with you when I just gave up and bailed out.

 

[Imaro]

They're not the same thing. They are more than tangentially related, however, because in order to respond to the outcome of a given player-driven scene, it is necessary to frame a new scene on the fly. The elements of that scene may on may occasions be pregiven (eg some key NPCs, perhaps even a key location) but the details won't be, as they arise out of what happened previously.

A robust system of encounter-building guidelines based on level appropriate DCs helps with this. A simulationist system makes it harder, because either (i) the simulation gets the DCs wrong relative to level and pacing considerations, or (ii) building in enough additional factors(eg in a combat or other physical challenge, perhaps weather or lighting) to make the simulation generate the right numbers for pacing and level considerations takes too much time. (This is based on my own experience of the differences between running Rolemaster and running 4e.)

Ok, you still have not explained how 4e's gamist system makes pacing and thematic meaning in a challenge any easier since the rules are only presenting DC's that represent a mechanically appropriate encounter for whatever level of challenge you wish to present to the players. Yet in no way do the rules, in and of themselves, incorporate pacing or theme as you claim.

My understanding is that a prestige class is (i) subject to GM approval, and (ii) tends to require the PC to achieve the requisite backstory in the course of play (the non-mechanical prerequisites for many prestige classes). Of course, (ii) is another avenue for the GM to control access to the class, given that the GM is typically the final arbiter on the world design and encounter design consideratins that would determine whether or not (ii) can be satisfied.

Paragon paths have neither (i) or (ii). That's the difference. And it is consistent with a more general difference in tenor of the two rulesets as to where this sort of control over the fiction is located.

And yet even 4e has rule 0 so everything still boils down to whether the DM approves it or not... I mean I don't know too many GM's who are going to just let a player take any PP they want from Dark Sun in a FR, Eberron or PoL setting. Also Paragon Paths are still limited by their finite number (unlike Heroquest where a character can create anything he wants) and their own sets of requirements as well as the DM's whim ( As a purely made up example...How can a player in 4e take a Dragon Slayer PP without the DM's agreement that dragons exsist?)... again this seems more your way of looking at 4e and could just as easily apply to 3.5 or Pathfinder.

Skill challenges for overland travel are one obvious example. A published instance I'm familiar with is Heathen in one of the early free online Dungeons.

How is the design of a skill challenge (X successes before Y failures) any better than setting up 5 obstacles in a wilderness journey using Pathfinder, that must be faced before reaching a destination? In fact I feel like I have more control over pacing here because the challenges don't end arbitrarily or become pointless because my players happened to fail 3 checks before 5 were made. In my 3.5 game if I set up 5 obstacles my PC's will face five obstacles (barring something like death as a reprecussion for failing to overcome one of them) then my PC's will face 5 meaningful obstacles. In fact I would say that individual reprecussions and awards cater to the thematic concerns and narrative of different PC's better than one that has a binary ending regardless of how well or bad you did individually.

The healing mechanics are another. Both short rests and extended rests - which separate healing from any ingame activity or use of resources - open up much greater flexibility for scene framing, and reduce the impact of ingame causal considerations on the transition from scene to scene (again, the contrast here with Rolemaster and AD&D is very stark - 3E, with its wands of CLW, might make the contrast less stark, but I don't know that wands of CLW contribute very much to a feeling of heroic protagonism).

Wait...what? Short rests and extended rests are very much tied into in-game time. You can't penalize someone for not taking an extended rest unless a certain amount of in-game time has passed... and the same goes for a short rest... so again I'm not seeing your point.

These two techniques can in fact be combined so that - for example - the consequence of a failure in an overland travel challenge is inability to get an extended rest. Which then allows what are, in the gameworld, encounters that occur on different days (and therefore not threatening to verisimilitude in their temporal proximity) to be, in mechanical terms, encounters drawing on the same bundle of daily resources. This is harder to achieve in a game where healing is heavily simulationist and closely linked to the ingame activity of the PCs, and in which skill checks and their contribution to overland travel are also handled in a much more micro-detail fashion.

Again... there are in-game ties to these things, it appears that you are just choosing to ignore them. Extended rests can be taken every 8 hours I believe and short term rests are. every 5 minutes.. that's in-game time.

What I've just described can't be done in Rolemaster (unless the GM suspends the normal action resolution rules) without going through all the minutiae of the skill checks to determine whether or not the PCs find a place to rest, succeed in getting to sleep, make their RRs against getting woken by biting insects and hooting owls, etc etc. The core 3E rulebooks don't, to me, suggest that 3E plays any differently from RM in this regard.

But you are ignoring the normal in-game ties to time that extended rests and short rests have in 4e. As far as your take on 3e's skills go... do you really think you have to roll to go to sleep? The narrative and thematic control in 3e is set by the particular challenges the PC's face... if I want to drain them and make them tired then I make them face the difficulty of finding good shelter... if I want them to face being weakened the obstacles become monsters... and so on

It allows, for example, a player to play a ranger, whose knowledge of the wilderness contributes importantly to the party's survival, without the actual play experience at the table bogging down into tedious minutiae about setting up campsites.

Well IMO, this boils down more to DM and Player style than anything in the rules of 3.5 or 4e... I've seen minutae filled skill challenges and a single skill check cover a broad area in 3.x

In the combat case, it allows players to build and play PCs whose protagonism is expressed via their choices in combat - this is always likely to be fairly central to a D&D game, given what D&D is about - without getting bogged down in (i) high search-and-handling time minutiae, and (ii) excessive grittiness. The combat pacing feeds into this. The way in which the PCs rebound in combat - what powers do they use, against whom, synergising with whom, at what potential costs - is part of what narrativist play in D&D involves (if you don't want combat in your narrativism, don't play D&D!).

Huh? 3.x also allows PC's to express their protagonism via their choices in combat... 4e may nnot have "high search" (and mostly because it forces every player to carry a mini-rules sheet in the form of power cards)... it certainly does have a high amount of handling and tracking with it's numerous fidly bits that change constantly..

As far as grittiness goes... I don't understand your usage of the word. IMO, Runequest is gritty... D&D in all forms (without houserules) just isn't. IMO, the synergizing of powers is tactical play not narrativist. You can slap a coating of narativism over it but it's ultimately tactical play... your powers synergize to produce tactical variance in the game... they do not inherently produce a narrative.

The whole tone of your post implies that I'm mistaken in my views as to what 4e can do as a system, its strengths, and its differences from more simulationist systems. And maybe I am - the human capacity for self-deception knows few limits! But it seems strange to me that you simultaneously deny that 4e can deliver the same play experience as 3E, and deny those actual examples of difference that a fairly experienced 4e GM is putting forward. What are the differences, then?

I'm not Beginning but I'll touch on this... IMO, the differences are gamism vs. simulationism... you see all I'm reading in your posts are how you've tweaked and slapped a coat of paint on a gamist system to make it more narrative in your opinion. And for the record I am running a Heroquest Nameless Streets game on the weekends and IMO, it plays nothing like 4e.

 

[Hussar]

Oh dear. You seem to be confused.

Allow me to explain the analogy for you:

"Tent" = "Current Edition of the Game Supported by WotC"

Now, re-read your message and see if it makes any sense at all.

Oh, fair enough. I figured that since for much of D&D's history, there have been multiple supported editions of D&D in print at the same time, the Tent simply means "Playing D&D in some form".

3e players have support from Paizo, 4e from WOTC. Basic/Expert D&D players, 1e and 2e players all had support from TSR at the same time (all three editions saw more than a couple of years of overlap of printing). Is there really a large difference?

But, if your tent only means "The most current iteration of D&D", then sure, I can see how the tent feels smaller when it doesn't speak directly to you. Then again, the tent now speaks directly to me, so, is the tent smaller, larger or the same size, just with different people inside?

After all, since Raven Crowking is posting in this thread, 3e certainly didn't speak to him. 300 pages of house rules and a pretty strident constant criticism of all things 3e would mean to me that the 3e tent wasn't too comfortable for him. Now, the 4e tent still doesn't speak to him, so, I guess it's a wash.

The assumption here is that 3e somehow had broader appeal than 4e. That 3e supported various playstyles better than 4e. That's a pretty difficult thing to prove.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I mean, I would be very happy to define the tent as "all rpgs", in which case it is a very big tent indeed.

But, in the case of WotC, "D&D is all a big tent with room for every edition!" rings false when they have limited access to earlier editions as far as they legally can. Likewise, "4e is a big tent with room for every playstyle!" rings false when one examines the designer commentary or what the edition actually does well.

The problem is, the original column from Mearl's (from the OP) doesn't actually state that. Where does anyone from WOTC actually say that? It's quite possible I missed it, it's a big thread after all. What Mearl's actually says is:

When we look at the past, we see how we played the game and learn where it started. As we move forward from D&D’s beginning, we see how the game changed, why it changed, and how we changed in response. When we understand the sum of those 38 years of changes, we can understand the present. We can see the big picture, the tale that extends from 1973 (the year Gary signed the foreword to the Original Edition) to today. A cycle emerges, as each version of the game represents a shift from one gaming generation to the next. What I’d like to do in this column is inspect that cycle, take it apart, and use it to look to the future.

Which is something I think most of us would agree with.

/snip

On a tangent: Want to lead me to Rome, WotC? Release "Return to the Forbidden City" with a big (not mini-scale) poster map of the Forbidden City, and a ton of detailed locations as a mini-campaign setting. Done well, I'd pay a pretty penny for that boxed set, and I don't even play 4e!

Well, just think about it, okay?


RC

Oh dude, that would rock on toast. I'd be right behind you on this one.

Ok, you still have not explained how 4e's gamist system makes pacing and thematic meaning in a challenge any easier since the rules are only presenting DC's that represent a mechanically appropriate encounter for whatever level of challenge you wish to present to the players. Yet in no way do the rules, in and of themselves, incorporate pacing or theme as you claim.

That's actually not quite accurate. For one, DC's can be mixed and matched without any problem, so, no, DC's won't necessarily be mechanically "appropriate". Additionally, you can have a success (or failure) count as multiple, meaning that you can end a challenge before the intially estimation of successes.

So, pacing is actually quite easy to control and, has the added bonus, of not having any one element completely bog down play as each part of the challenge should be roughly the same length.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I figured that since for much of D&D's history, there have been multiple supported editions of D&D in print at the same time, the Tent simply means "Playing D&D in some form". 3e players have support from Paizo,

I'm straining to find any interpretation of Mearls' column that suggests Pathfinder should be recognized as part of the D&D tent. I have to admit that I'm not really finding it.

Which is something I think most of us would agree with.

I wouldn't. I think Mearls' attempt to claim the current generation of gamers by fiat is exactly the sort of hubris that people have been objecting to.

Additionally, you can have a success (or failure) count as multiple, meaning that you can end a challenge before the intially estimation of successes.

If you're playing RAW, that's only true for successes. And for successes it's only true if the skill challenge has a complexity of 3+ and only if the check had a hard DC.

This is one of the major problems I have with the "system": Whenever it's discussed, the advocates inevitably start claiming that in order for skill challenges to really work right the first thing you need to do is ignore the rules for skill challenges.

(Assuming, of course, that you can even figure out what the current system for skill challenges is supposed to be given the dozen different systems WotC has published in the last two years. In this case I'm basing my statement on the rules as they appear in the Rules Compendium.)

So, pacing is actually quite easy to control and, has the added bonus, of not having any one element completely bog down play as each part of the challenge should be roughly the same length.

"Everything is roughly the same length" is a really awful methodology for pacing, though.

Which is my second major problem with skill challenges: Taking pacing out of the hands of the GM and the players in order to turn it over to a simplistic mechanic is, IMO, ridiculous. I can sort of vaguely see how they might be useful as a set of training wheels for complete newbies; but they don't seem particularly effective at the training part of that equation. They also seem to be welded on.

My third major problem is that no one has shown me a single example of play using skill challenges which can in any way be differentiated from not counting successes and instead simply adjudicating logical results from the game world.

So it's a system where you gain nothing, lose much, and usually (according to its own advocates) need to ignore it in any case.

 

[nnms]

If you can't tell the difference between what Czege describes and railroading, or in Edwards' terminology the differene between plot and situational authority, then I don't know what experience you're bringing to this, but I assume it doesn't include much familiarity with modern/indie RPGs.

This.

I played a lot of BECMI and AD&D2E but 3.x left me utterly cold (though I still played and ran it some as I had some friends who liked it). During that time I played a ton of modern/indie RPGs. Sorcerer, My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc.,. I never really posted on The Forge because of the pedantry there, but I lurked nigh endlessly.

My reaction to 4E was "Yes! A D&D that does what it says on the box!". But I soon discovered something very, very interesting. 4E worked seemlessly with techniques like kickers and bangs, best interests, hard scene framing, aspects, and others. I had tried my hardest to get those techniques to work with 3.x but I always found the universal framework to simulate a fantasy world would often get in the way. 4E just doesn't have that particular trapping. It may have others, but not that one.

One of the reasons that 4E works well as a non-scripted game compared to 3E is how explicitly the system beats are defined. It's like notes on a musical score. You have the beats for the starting and ending of combat, the beats of how many encounters until you level, the beats of leveling being a pacing mechanic rather than a power mechanic. Even within some encounters there are beats. Like a beat on each success or failure in a skill challenge.

Each of these beats are ideal moments for scene framing. Previous editions might have similar moments, but not as part of the overall reward cycle of the game.

To get back to the issue of "just in time DMing" and railroading, I think the best technique to illustrate this would be bangs. What's a bang?

"Introducing events into the game which make a thematically-significant or at least evocative choice necessary for a player."
- Ron Edwards​

It's a choice as a player that you can't ignore and that will make a thematic statement. You may think "I have those all the time in my game already" but might I suggest there's a difference between recognizing them after the fact and specifically framing a scene to create a situation that would qualify as a bang? Similarly, a bang is a situation where no one at the table knows what the result would be. For if a DM decided it in advance, then the player in question no longer has the ability to make that decision and say something about the theme of the game.

So if I frame a scene where you have to deal with something in a way that is going to produce thematically relevant content, how can I already have the next scene planned? If I do, then the choice made in the previous scene is actually irrelevant.

The character's actions might make the thematic statement "if you don't know what the right thing to do is, always choose self sacrifice and you'll make it there." But then if my next planned scene is where their sacrifice is undone and whatever they chose to sacrifice to protect is destroyed anyway, then I have taken away the player's ability to make thematic statements because my plot authority makes my thematic statements override their own.

For bangs, I must DM in a "just in time" fashion where the next scene is informed by the previous or I gut the player's thematic authority.

Now where 4E shines in this regard is that it assumes that the PCs and all NPCs and monsters do not follow the same rules framework. So if I need to suddenly throw in a combat with a powerful spell caster, I can do that with 4E without violating the precepts of the system. With 3.x, I'd either have had to prep that spell caster using the same framework as a PC or I have to chuck the system out and fake it. 4E's design for effect is much, much more improv friendly than 3.x's universal simulation framework.

To get back to Pemerton's quote, I've found that the greatest impediment in communicating about this stuff is when the other person only sees RPG rules and procedures as the means to determine whether or not a character succeeds at a task and by how much.

 

[pemerton]

Yet in no way do the rules, in and of themselves, incorporate pacing or theme as you claim.

Here are some ways the rules incorporate, or open the door, to thematic content:

*If I choose to play an eladrin, I am playing a PC who straddles two worlds - the mundane, mortal world, and the magic otherworld of faerie. This in and of itself brings into play the thematic questions "What is the relationship between these two worlds?" and 'What is my response to being of these two worlds?"

*If I choose to play a warlock, I am playing a PC who has made a pact with some otherworldly and/or esoteric source of power. This in and of itself brings into play the thematic questions "What is my relationship to the source of my pact? What justifies me in having made such a pact?"

*If I build a fighter with the power Come and Get It, every encounter that I use that power I have to answer the question "How did it come about that my foes suddenly converged on me, and then got chopped by me?" By answering that question the player is able to inject thematic content directly into the game via the behaviour of opposing NPCs.​

Core 3E has, as far as I'm aware, nothing analogous to the eladrin. The closest it comes to the warlock is the paladin or monk, but because the game includes GM-arbitrated mechanical alignment the thematic content is in the hands of the GM as much as, if not more than, in the hands of the player (an idea that I develop in greater detail here). 3E has no mechanics comparable to Come and Get It (in fact, the presence of Come and Get It in 4e is one of the main differences adduced in criticisms of 4e - I agree that it's a difference, but for me it's a reason to prefer 4e over 3E).

Here is an example of how 4e has rules that support both pacing and theme:

*The 4e combat rules are such that, early in a combat, the monsters will tend to win, wheras somewhere about halfway through the PCs, through drawing on their deeper but more conditional resources (action points, daily powers, healing surges, greater battlefield control, etc) will come back and (typically) win. If the encounter is more than a level or so above the party level, it is likely that in the course of the combat at least one PC will drop unconscious and have to be revived as part of the PCs' come back.​

This dynamic of pacing is a deliberate feature of 4e's design. It is achieved by features such as giving PCs but not monsters (other than solos and elites) action points, and powers at the level of daily powers. It is achieved by giving monsters more hit points, but PCs healing surges and greater access to temporary hit points, which access is conditional in various ways, requiring skillful manipulation of the game's action economy. It is achieved by giving PCs better capabilities in movement and control, but which again are often able to be accessed only conditionally (eg movement as an immediate action in resopnse to an attack) and again which require skillful manipulation of the action economy, as well as sound judgement in relation to battlefield positioning and terrain.

3E does not have this. There is nothing like second wind in 3E. Healing potions aren't a very effective substitute, because they take a standard action to use. Movement by non-spellcasters in 3E is discouraged by the full attack rules. The death and dying rules of 3E have a different (and less dramatic) pacing dynamic than those of 4e.

Finally, 3E - at least at mid-to-high levels - favours scry-teleport-ambush as the optimal mode of combat, with save-or-die/suck spells being used to shut down the opposition as much as possible. To the extent that, in a 3E combat, the tide of combat is running the monsters' way rather than the PCs, something is going wrong. Whereas 4e has combat mechanics in which the PCs picking themselves up off the mat and turning the tide is the norm. This is dramatic. It's exciting. And because it requires the players to engage a life-or-death situation using their PCs as vehicles to turn the tide, it opens the door wide to the expression by the players of thematic ideas as part of their resolution of the combat.

Here's another example:

*A player plays a ranger. That player likes the idea of being a rugged wilderness guide, who helps the party survive in the wilds. Resolution of overland travel by way of skill challenge permits this PC to realise this role, and make a real difference (Does the party succeed in getting an extended rest? Does the party lose healing surges from exhaustion or not?), without having to actual play out all the minutiae of looking for tracks, describing the terrain, describing the layout of the camp, etc.​

What I've just described supports both pacing (ie avoidance of minutiae that bog the game down in the minutiae of exploration that don't contribute any engaging thematic content) while nevertheless permitting the player in question to realise his/her vision of his/her PC - including having to actually stake things on the PC's talent as a wilderness guide (because failures in the skill challenge will cost the party).

In 3E I don't know of any mechanic for telescoping overland travel in this way. It's either go through all the minutiae and resolve it via scene extrapolation, or it's GM handwaving.

As for DCs and non-simulationism (you call it gamism, but I'm talking here about narrativist play, not gamist play):

*In the aforementioned skill challenge, how hard is it for the ranger to successfully lead the party to safety through the wilderness? Page 42 gives me an answer to that question without having to work out minutiae such as the details of the terrain.

*The PCs are walking down a corridor in an old tomb. They notice a niche in the wall, holding a statue of Orcus (3 of them are divine casters associated with the Raven Queen, so naturally the statue is going to be an Orcus statue). The paladin decides to use Religion to determine whether or not the statue has any supernatural properties. What's the DC? Page 42 gives me a simple answer to that question. Having determined that the statue contains powerful necromantic energy, the paladin decides to cleanse it of that energy in the name of the Raven Queen. What's the DC? What's the benefit of success? What's the penalty for failure? Page 42 gives me simple answers to those questions too (benefit - +2 on next significant d20 roll; penalty - damage equal to a low normal damage expression).​

Rolemaster can't do this, because it has no generic rules for level-appropriate DCs and damage. It also doesn't support the non-simulationist idea that one scene can generate a bonus that carries over into another scene (like +2 for cleansing the statue) without worrying about what, exactly, ingame this represents - the player can decide, for example, whether it's the Raven Queen rewarding the PC, or alternatively can just treat is a metagame reward for engaging with the thematic content that has been brought to the table.

To the best of my knowledge 3E is in the same position as Rolemaster in this regard.

3.x also allows PC's to express their protagonism via their choices in combat

To an extent, of course it does. So does Runequest. But Rolemaster does moreso than Runequest, because each round in melee, and every time a spell is cast, the player must choose how much to stake on the attempt (in melee, that is by allocating points to attack and defence; in casting, that is by choosing how many spell points to spend and how much spell failure to risk).

3E is, in this respect, closer to Runequest. Put somewhat crudely, character build decides what a PC will do in combat, and actual combat resolution is about doing that thing and hoping the dice come up high. 4e, on the other hand, is closer to Rolemaster. The more subtle action economy, the more varied range of powers (for fighters this is obvious; for wizards it's also true, somewhat paradoxically, because the overwhelmingly salient 3E option of spamming with the best save-or-suck/die spell is taken away), all make round-by-round decision making crucial.

As far as grittiness goes... I don't understand your usage of the word. IMO, Runequest is gritty... D&D in all forms (without houserules) just isn't.

This is true of 3E damage. I don't think it's particular true of 3E grapple (because of the opposed checks, which make the resolution closer to Runequest in certain respects). For similar reasons I don't think it's true of 3E tripping.

even 4e has rule 0 so everything still boils down to whether the DM approves it or not

4e doesn't have rule 0. It does have a brief discussion of whether or not the GM should fudge rolls (p 15). My own play experience suggests there is no need to - the system is very robust, and won't give game-wrecking results simply in virtue of a string of high or low rolls.

The Rules Compendium, page 54, has a heading "It's the DM's World", which goes on to talk about altering the core assumptions of the game in order to make "a unique, personalized world". This does not in any sense imply that, during the course of actual play, the GM has the authority to veto or oversee players' character-building choices.

How can a player in 4e take a Dragon Slayer PP without the DM's agreement that dragons exsist?

This is about social contract, and establishing what world the game is being played in. Like any other game, sensible 4e players would resolve this before starting to play together. (In my case, I emailed all my players telling them to build PoL PCs, that any Forgotten Realms stuff had to be refluffed as PoL, and that each PC needed to have a backstory including, at a minimum, (i) a reason to be ready to adventure, and (ii) a reason to be ready to fight goblins.)

There is no suggestion that player choices about retraining, PP or ED selection, etc are subject to GM approval. (Retraining, by the way, is another feature of the game that differs from 4e, which facilitates the player in expressing evolving thematic concerns via rebuild of a PC.)

How is the design of a skill challenge (X successes before Y failures) any better than setting up 5 obstacles in a wilderness journey using Pathfinder, that must be faced before reaching a destination?

Because it might have nothing to do with 5 obstacles. It might be 5 obstacles. It might be on obstacle, but with four resulting complications in the course of engaging with that obstacle. What those complications are is likely, furthermore, to depend on what has happened before in the course of resolving the skill challenge.

This is like asking, Wouldn't an extended contest in HeroQuest 2nd ed, which requires getting 5 points for success, be just the same as having 5 obstacles? The answer in both cases is no.

In fact I feel like I have more control over pacing here because the challenges don't end arbitrarily or become pointless because my players happened to fail 3 checks before 5 were made. In my 3.5 game if I set up 5 obstacles my PC's will face five obstacles (barring something like death as a reprecussion for failing to overcome one of them) then my PC's will face 5 meaningful obstacles

Well, if you run your skill challenge in such a way that when 3 failures have occured you can't explain what is happening in the gameworld, or what the rationale for the resulting fictional situation is, then you've got a problem, I agree. This would be like narrating an extended contest in such a way that when 5 points are accrued you can't explain how one side won and the other lost.

Luckily for me, I avoid this. One way I avoid this, as indicated above, is by treating each check in the challenge not as a discrete obstacle, but as a response to a previously-narrated complication. (This also, by the way, further explicates the relationship beteen this sort of situation-driven narrative play and "just in time" GMing. It also resonates with Czege's comments about keeping the personalities of NPCs somewhat flexible in their original conception, so they can be developed an precisified as part of the process of introducing and resolving complications. In an overland travel skill challenge, the same idea applies to weather and terrain.)

In fact I would say that individual reprecussions and awards cater to the thematic concerns and narrative of different PC's better than one that has a binary ending regardless of how well or bad you did individually.

Well, I follow the advice in the DMG and the DMG2 and impose consequences for individual skill checks as the challenge unfolds. These can be both narrative consequences - if PC 1 has just successfully Intimidated an NPC, this may have implications for the range of options available to PC 2 hoping to use Diplomacy - and mechanical consequences - when I ran a "running out of the collapsing temple after you stopped the dark ritual" skill challenge, indvidual failed checks resulted in damage to that PC, as pieces of falling masonry were only narrowly dodged.

Short rests and extended rests are very much tied into in-game time. You can't penalize someone for not taking an extended rest unless a certain amount of in-game time has passed... and the same goes for a short rest... so again I'm not seeing your point.

First, this isn't quite correct. As discussed in various places (DMG 2 at least, perhaps also the Essentials GM's guide) the short rest is first and foremost a pacing tool. Page 263 of the PHB describes it as "about 5 minutes long". The GM's guidelines make it clear that the GM is free to vary this in order to support encounter pacing.

To give a concrete example: Suppose the PCs just finish fighting some orcs on a plain. They see another mass of orcs in the distance, charging towards them. The 4e rules do not encourage the GM to calculate the distance between the two groups, divide that distance by the pace of the orcs, and thereby determine whether or not a short rest is viable. They do encourage the GM to characterise the distance and the time in dramatic rather than literal terms ("You can see them bearing down on you as you quickly get your breath . . . ) and to allow the short rest (or, perhaps, to make it turn on a skill challenge in some fashion - perhaps a Complexity 1 skill challenge to briefly find some cover in the nearby hills, for example).

(This emphasis on the drama of space and time, rather than its literalness, is also remiscent of the following passage from the rules of Maelstrom Storytelling:

se "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. ... focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. ... If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game. ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.​

Of course, those remarks don't apply to 4e tactical combat. And my biggest single criticism of the 4e action resolution mechanics - oft repeated - is that there isn't enough guidance on how to integrate skill challenges and combat.)

As for extended rests - in the most recent overland travel skill challenge that I ran, one consequence of failure was that the PCs failed to get an extended rest. The sequence of skill rolls was first a failure by the ranger, and then a success by the wizard, on a nature check. The narration was that as the party trudged through the swamp along the river, they had no luck finding a place to camp until the wizard spotted what looked like a slight rise of dryer land. They stopped there to rest, but had a fitful sleep tormented by insects and hence were barely rested when morning came.

A system that more closely connects healing into the expenditure of ingame resources (like a wand of cure light wounds) or the performance of ingame actions (like recovering X hp per Y days of bedrest) makes it harder to manipulate recovery in this sort of fashion.

The narrative and thematic control in 3e is set by the particular challenges the PC's face... if I want to drain them and make them tired then I make them face the difficulty of finding good shelter... if I want them to face being weakened the obstacles become monsters... and so on

Right. I can play this way to. I did so for close to 20 years running Rolemaster. It's a style of play that has many virtues. Strong pacing is, in my experience, not one of them. Too often you have to fight against the system, because there is no obvious alternative (other than GM fiat) to actually playing it all out via the minutiae of task resolution and scene extrapolation. Which is, by away, exactly what I see as implicit in the phase "make the face the difficulty of finding good shelter".

Of course, I did that too in my skill challenge - it's just that I resolved it in a different, non-simulationist fashion (as I've mentioned several times in this post and ad nauseum in other posts, there is a strong resemblance to HeroWars/Quest extended challenges).

IMO, the synergizing of powers is tactical play not narrativist. You can slap a coating of narativism over it but it's ultimately tactical play... your powers synergize to produce tactical variance in the game... they do not inherently produce a narrative.

I don't know quite what you mean by "produce a narrative". By "narrativism" I'm meaning it in the technical sense coined at the Forge - that is, play which aims to engage with thematic ideas, and express them, in the course of play. (Edwards calls this "addressing a premise". My personal view is that his notion of what counts as an interesting premise is a bit narrow - he focuses too much on moral questions to the exclusion of aesthetics, for example. But I believe that he is a biologist, not a philosopher or literary theorist, so his narrowness here is pretty easily forgivable.)

There is no conflict between tactical play and narrativism (although most Forge games lean away from 4e-style tactics - that's partially why my group plays D&D in preference to Forge games). As I've indicated above, tactical choices can be one way of engaging with and expressing thematic content. The range of options in 4e, both at the point of character build and at the point of round-by-round decision-making, certainly permit this in my experience. For example, meaningful options can include cowardice, expedience, courage, self-sacrifice, callousness, deceit and the like.

Now of course all of that is possible in other games as well, but what is interesting about 4e is that a PC can be built and played so that making these sorts of choices does not require tactical trade offs. The game isn't perfect, of course, but most of the time a player does not have to worry about trading off thematic commitment against effectiveness, but rather is able to be effective precisely by expressing a certain thematic commitment. (The poster children for this sort of combat are of course HeroQuest - where relationships and other theme-bearing attributes function as augments - and The Riddle of Steel - where spiritual attributes give bonus dice. 4e is probably not as strong as those games in this respect, but as always in life there are trade offs. 4e also does things those games don't do.)

Well IMO, this boils down more to DM and Player style than anything in the rules of 3.5 or 4e... I've seen minutae filled skill challenges and a single skill check cover a broad area in 3.x

Of course player style matters. As I've posted upthread, for many years I ran a vanilla narrativist Rolemaster game. I'm sure I could run a vanilla narrativist 3E game. But 4e has features that better support narrativism (and with rules like skill challenges, Come and Get It, healing surges, etc it's not entirely vanilla).

Again, I'm puzzled as to why someone who agrees that 4e is different from 3E is so hostile to any actual detaild suggestion as to where the differences might lie.

IMO, the differences are gamism vs. simulationism... you see all I'm reading in your posts are how you've tweaked and slapped a coat of paint on a gamist system to make it more narrative in your opinion.

Well, as Ron Edwards has pointed out here and here, it's not particularly surprising that a given system might support both narrativist and gamist play (examples he gives are Tunnels and Trolls and Marvel Super Heroes). Both sorts of play involve grabbing hold of the game elements, and using them to do something rather than just exploring them.

So, for example, skipping over minutiae can help get to the challenges without tedious preludes (works for gamism) or allow expression of protagonism without tedious preludes (works for narrativism). Building my PC to deploy a certain tactical ability can be an expression of cleverness (works for gamism) or - where the various abilities between which I'm choosing express different thematic concerns, like (for example) a self-heal vs an other-heal, or necrotic damage vs radiant damge - an expression of thematic concern (works for narrativism).

And for the record I am running a Heroquest Nameless Streets game on the weekends and IMO, it plays nothing like 4e.

What can I say - it sounds like you've had bad experiences with 4e. But I can assure you I've not done any major tweaking. Other than the two conditions on PC background that I stipulated for my group - not something that the DMG canvasses, to the best of my recollection - I'm just playing it according to the manual.