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

Is ANYONE other than you hung up on the Forge red herring?

The problem has been well defined with no need to muddy the waters with Forge ambiguities.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here by "the problem".

Just as some things about 4e design have been obvious to you from day 1, so some things about it have been obvious to me from that day also, or not too much after it. There was this comment from Heinsoo, for example, about the reemblance to indie RPGs in the design (which was discussed at some length upthread, around the 450s). And there were posts on these boards from Chris Sims about the rationale and use of healing surges (can't link, sorry). Having read these various desinger comments, and having read the rulebooks in light of them, and then having played the game, my principal claim was, has always been, and continues to be, that 4e supports narrativist play better than 3E. A related claim has always been that 4e does not support exploration-oriented (ie simulationist) play as well as does 3E.

A number of contributions on this thread - particularly from Imaro and Beginning of the End - have denied the first of these claims. If you're now telling me that they've been using "narrativist" in some other sense - despite the fact that I made my use of Forge terminology clear pretty much from the get-go - that's interesting, but also a bit confusing. What claim of mine did all those posts think they were trying to rebut?
 

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Who says that? That would be crazy talk.
Sorry, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. That is, I can't tell whether you think your blog shows that 3E can do 4e better than 4e (once we keep in mind some features of encounter design in respect of which the 4e rulebooks give explicity guidance), or whether you think it shows that there's some stuff that 4e does better than 3E, although 3E can approximate to it in various respects.
 

As I've said - apparently everyone agrees that 4e is different from 3E, except nearly everyone who doesn't like 4e also agrees that 4e does nothing that 3E can't do better

I don't particularly care for 4Ed, and I'm not shy about saying what I found wrong with it. However, there are things I think 4Ed did, not just better than 3.X, but better than every previous version of D&D.

Its just that the minuses outnumber and outweigh the plusses.
 

Sorry, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. That is, I can't tell whether you think your blog shows that 3E can do 4e better than 4e (once we keep in mind some features of encounter design in respect of which the 4e rulebooks give explicity guidance), or whether you think it shows that there's some stuff that 4e does better than 3E, although 3E can approximate to it in various respects.

The latter.
 


Pemerton,

I have seen a claim that 3e can handle 4e-style gaming better than 4e can handle 3e-style gaming; I have seen no claim that 3e can handle 4e-style gaming better than 4e can. That would, indeed, be crazy talk.


RC
 

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here by "the problem".
OK.....

Heinsoo... Chris Sims ...
I'm not seeing how tangential quotes trump on topic quotes. But whatever.

4e supports narrativist play better than 3E.
There was a whole separate long thread about this. And you and I were both active in it. At that time you seemed to clearly understand my point about narrative play. Now youu have completely changed the defintion. So fine. I declare you the winner with regard to your defintion. I think that is a pretty hollow victory though because the reasons for significant discontent with 4E are not associated with your defintion. I certainly don't view poast 491 of this thread as "from the get go".

A related claim has always been that 4e does not support exploration-oriented (ie simulationist) play as well as does 3E.
I also reject your replacement of "simulaton" with "exploration-oriented". 4E does "exploration" just fine, but it is lacking in simulation.

A number of contributions on this thread - particularly from Imaro and Beginning of the End - have denied the first of these claims.
I'm not going to speak for them. But disputing your evidence does not mean they agree with your definitions.
 


I'm not seeing how tangential quotes trump on topic quotes.

<snip>

There was a whole separate long thread about this. And you and I were both active in it. At that time you seemed to clearly understand my point about narrative play. Now youu have completely changed the defintion. So fine. I declare you the winner with regard to your defintion. I think that is a pretty hollow victory though because the reasons for significant discontent with 4E are not associated with your defintion. I certainly don't view poast 491 of this thread as "from the get go".
BryonD, there seems to have been needless disagreement/semantic confusion here. (Not on your part, or not on your part solely. Mutual confusion as between the two of us.)

Unless I've radically misread them, BotE and Imaro have for many posts on this thread since post 491 been disputing the claim I made in that post, and have been defending in relatation to their responses since that post. That post made the same claim about 4e's support for my gaming style that I made in other posts on other threads (I'm not sure which one you have in mind - probably either my Actual Play thread about bears and water weirds, or Mercurius's other Road thread, or Mercurius's Reason Why 4e is Less Popular thread.) I can't rememeber in which threads I was using Forge terminology and in which not - depending on context and what other terminology has been in use in a thread, I sometimes use it and sometimes other terminology.

And the claim I made in 491, and take myself to have been defending since, is not a claim about what you call narrativism and also (if I remember properly) "fiction first" (in the style of LostSoul).

I also reject your replacement of "simulaton" with "exploration-oriented". 4E does "exploration" just fine, but it is lacking in simulation.
I think 4e has limits in what it can do with exploration. Or rather, I don't think it handles exploration on its own very well, as the sole goal of RPGing divorced from other purposes. To give an example: in the coures of playing a 4e combat, playes will discover whether or not a given "game piece" is a minion. From the mechanical point of view, indeed, this often an interesting discovery. But because minion is primarily a metagame status, the discovery is not generally revelatory of the gameworld. So if exploration was all that was going on, the exploration would primarily be of a system heavily divorced from the fiction. (I think this is what is sometimes meant by criticisms of 4e as "dissociated" or as "merely gamist" - where "gamist" here is not being used in the Forge's sense.)

Once exploration of the gameworld is coupled with some other purpose for play, however, then the discovery of the metagame fact that a monster is a minion can play a purpose, for example of sharpening the connection that the players are drawing between gameplay, fiction and that other purpose. In the example I gave upthread of rindering an NPC a minion via a skill check before then killing said NPC with magic missile, the other purpose in question is something like an aesthetic/thematic statement about the permissibility - or even manditoriness - of ruthless treatment of devil worshippers.

I'm not going to speak for them. But disputing your evidence does not mean they agree with your definitions.
Well, I think that they know what I am claiming via my use of my terms, and disputing it. Which, obviously, on an open message board is their prerogative.

But it's also why I'm still interested to see someone's actual play account of running a game with 3E that is narrativist (in the Forgist sense).
 


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