why is encounter balance and player balance (in combat) so important for 4e? I think gamist focused play benefits much more from a robustly balanced encounter design system than other games... I think Exalted, LoA, and Heroquest are all more focused on the type of thematic play that permerton speaks to... and none of them have a robustly balanced encounter design system (in fact they don't seem particularly concerned with balance in encounters, at all.)
Because it makes things vastly easier to DM for a new DM. And it allows much better narrative pacing
But again this mainly serves the combat encounter in 4e which centers around a gamist challenge
The last comment here tends to beg the question - you don't establish that 4e is primarily gamist by assuming that combat centres around gamism!
I agree with Neonchameleon but would go further - after GMing Rolemaster very regularly for nearly 20 years, I still find the balance and pacing support of 4e a huge benefit. Rolemaster has no encounter building guidelines (its monster levels are mechanically meaningless) and has incredibly swingy action resolution - mid-to-high level PCs have various resources (mostly spells) to cope with the more severe consequences of the swinginess, but they don't mitigate the effect of that swinginess on pacing.
So I find 4e's tools here very helpful even though I'm quite an experienced GM. And I don't really feel the force of Imaro's contrast with HeroQuest (I can't comment on Exalted or LoA) - HeroQuest also has pretty tight pacing guidelines built around action resolution difficulty numbers. (I have found that HeroQuest, Maelstrom Storytelling and to a lesser extent Burning Wheel have all been very helpful rulebooks for supporting my 4e GMing.)
And tools for controlling difficulty and pacing aren't just important for gamist play, as reflected by their incorporation into HeroQuest. They can also be helpful in theme-focused play, by allowing the stakes to be amped up or down in appropriate ways.
I think 4E neither specifically supports nor fails to support "strategise or die" gaming; most RPGs could be used that way just by amping the encounter/conflict opposition strength and stakes to the very edge. I think the need for "you need to be "1337" to survive" for gamist play is frequently, um, overstated. For me, at least, it's far more about the inter-player kudos awards for neat plays and nasty "gotchas". The challenge has to have a certain amount of, well, challenge, of course, to make the tactical plays worthwhile, but even when the deck is stacked to make TPK unlikely there can be challenge present.
A very good post. I agree, and it makes a lot more sense of 4e's gamist potential than most of what I see put forward in relation to that.
pemerton[/B] has convinced me that the same "manoeuvre room" that 4E affords that allow long campaigns of functional gamist play can also be used to bring in thematic (i.e. narrativist) elements.
That is not to say that I don't think there are many better narrativist supporting games out there, but many people do seem to be attached to D&D for colour/nostalgia/mythology reasons. As a result we get huge "edition wars" and impassioned tirades because, even though other games may do someone's preferred style far better than D&D ever did, they are wedded to D&D and now can't make it do what they want it to.
D&D is also far easier to find players for than other RPGs, for much the same reasons.
The end result, then, is that D&D 4E can support gamism - which was always D&d's "core competency" - and narrativism. The only folk "out in the cold" are the simulationist guys. That doesn't bother me - I found better places to scratch my sim itch long ago - but it does tear some folk up. Sad, really, since any move that will really help them will, I'm pretty sure, really screw the game up for those served already by 4E.
More good stuff - keep it coming! (Eventually I'll be able to XP you for some of it.)
I agree about the issues people have with D&D, and also the likely unhappy consequences for those (like me) who like 4e of a swing back towards simulationism.
I think that classic D&D gamism was different in its payoff structure from the sort of gamism you describe in relation to 4e (and this is part of why it's taken me a while to see where you're coming from in talking about 4e's gamism). I think in classic D&D play ("dungeon crawling") there is a very heavy chassis of exploration - think Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain as the most gonzo exemplars of this, and Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan as a slightly more naturalist version - with the gamism sitting on top of that, and consisting in using the information and lessons gained via exploration to "beat the dungeon". I think quite a bit of RM play also probably falls under this description.
The best characterisation I know of this sort of play, although I think he frames it in an unnecessarily pejorative context, comes from
Ron Edwards:
This person prefers a role-playing game that combines Gamist potential with Simulationist hybrid support, such that a highly Explorative Situation can evolve, in-game and without effort, into a Challenge Situation. In other words, the social-level Step On Up "emerges" from the events in-play. . . His preferred venue for the Gamist moments of play is a small-scale scene or crisis embedded in a larger-scale Exploration that focuses on Setting and Character. In these scenes, he's all about the Crunch: Fortune systems should be easy to estimate, such that each instance of its use may be chosen and embedded in a matrix of strategizing. . . As for playing the character, it's Author Stance all the way. He likes to imagine what "his guy" thinks, but to direct "his guy" actions from a cool and clear Step On Up perspective. The degree of Author Stance is confined to in-game imaginative events alone and doesn't bleed over into Balance of Power issues regarding resolution at all.
4e doesn't support this sort of play particularly well at all, in my view (which is why I get confused when some people say that 4e is all about the dungeon crawl) because it lacks the heavy explorative element (at least of setting if not character), and (as has been frequently discussed) it's action resolution mechanics tend to be orthogonal to much of the exploration, rather than reinforcing of it. I think that this difference of 4e from classic D&D is what helps explain why even traditional D&D gamists don't like 4e.
As to why I play D&D rather than something more obviously suited to my narrativist preferences, like HeroQuest: like I said upthread, I'm with a group that includes serious wargamers, M:TG champions, PbM winners etc. I'm the member of the group least into these sorts of games, but I still own 1000s of collectable gards (for ICE's and Decipher's LotR games). I'm the only member of the group who doesn't play computer games (on or offline) at all - most of the rest are pretty serious about them. In this group, tactically rich action resolution is a desirable technique - it gives us what we're looking for out of a game. It also supports those interplayer kudos awards that Balesir talks about. And it creates a particular sort of mechanical environment in which a certain sort of thematic material can be engaged with.
The preference for this sort of gameplay tends to rule out HeroQuest. Burning Wheel or The Riddle of Steel would probably be alternatives, but perhaps are a bit grittier than what my group is generally looking for - the whole history/myth element of gonzo fantasy, which 4e really emphasises both in the core rules and via books like Underdark and the Plane Above, is something my group enjoys. Hence 4e D&D.
For us, what keeps the game in RPing territory rather than skirmish territory is that these techniques are used in service of the sort of thematic play I've been talking about here (and on other threads, like the "Should this be fixed?" thread on General). It's by no means hardcore narrativism - it's pretty vanilla, and the thematic content is often not all that serious (the notion that narrativism has to be emotionally deep is one the I reject - it can be, but needn't be). Also, my other main point on this thread - about the forgiving character of 4e tactical play compared to real world tactics - means that any latent gamist pressure here needn't push away from engaging with the thematic material. We have one player in particular whose main interest probably is gamist rather than thematic -and who plays the archer-ranger/cleric - but because of the way the mechanics work his focus on Balesir-style play doesn't detract from the sort of play others are going for, and the way I set up encounters doesn't prevent him from engaging them in the Balesir style, mostly looking for kudos from his fellow players.
Based on my experience to date, then, I feel that 4e has struck a pretty nice balance in supporting my group's game, with basically no need to drift at all other than supplementing the tactical encounter build guidelines with thematic encounter/scenario build guidelines - but given that these are implicity in later books like Underdark and The Plane Above, I'm not even sure that this really counts as supplementation, let alone drfit.
