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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5567149" data-attributes="member: 42582">I tend to agree with both these posts, which probably puts me in a pretty awkard situation. The one point where I (perhaps) disagree with P1NBACK is that I think his/her comment about 4e shifting the focus from fiction to the boardgame-like reality of the battlemap is perhaps true as a generalisation of tendency, but is not a universal truth.I like these points, and share your experience of 4e combat resolution.But if P1NBACK was right that 4e's rules tend to discourage the creation of a shared imaginative space as the locus of action resolution - that is, if s/he was right that the rules tend in the direction of all the action being resolved at the board game/dice rolling level with no need for the players to engage one another with respect to the fiction - then that would be a pretty serious indictment of 4e. As P1NBACK has said, it wouldn't show that 4e is not an RPG, but it would diagnose a certain sort of weakness or flaw in 4e as an RPG. Because rather than a criticism of the particular system used to generate the fiction (eg dice mechanics vs "make stuff up"), it would be a criticism that there is no fiction in these sense that is integral to an RPG.I tend to agree with AbdulAlhazred on this. In 4e, for example, that Spinning Sweep can't happen unless you explain, in the fiction, how your fighter crosses the distance to the snake. So some aspects of the fiction are in play, and (in my experience) moreso than in many other fantasy RPGs.Of course, the retort to this is that the player of the fighter doesn't have to engage the fiction, but simply move a piece on a board - which is to say, that AbdulAlhazred's "different representational tools" are actually "RPG-negating action resolution techniques". I personally don't agree with this - I think the player has to engage with the fiction that the battlemap represents, like "is that difficult terrain rubble or a tree - so does it grant cover or not?" or "how high is that wall?" - but I understand that experiences could differ with respect to this.But as a general proposition, I don't agree that the 4e rules don't encourage the creation of a shared imaginative space that is relevant to action resolution. The skill challenge guidelines in both PHB and DMG, for example, are very clear on this, despite frequent suggestions to the contrary - but I do think that WotC consistently fails in its publications - particularly its adventure publications - to explain how to use 4e mechanics to support the share imaginative space. 4e material needs more good advice to both players and GMs on how to run the game so that the fiction matters.For example, while the skill challenge guidelines make it clear that there is to be a shared imaginative space which both players and GM are to engage in when resolving a skill challenge - but it doesn't give any advice on how, in practice, this is to be done. As a result, I didn't learn to GM 4e by reading 4e books - I learned to GM it mostly by reading rulebooks for HeroQuest, Maelstrom Storytelling and the Burning Wheel, plus reading essays and threads at the Forge. In my view, this is a problem that I think WotC is yet to address.(I think that the guidelines on combat encounter design are better than those for skill challenges - they encourage design elements that make the representation suggestive of the fiction rather than a subsitute for the fiction - but again in my experience the adventures often don't comply with the encounter design guidelines. Also, there are some interesting disuccsion of some of these issues on the recent <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/305854-fictional-positioning-currency-rules-d-d-4th-edition.html" target="_blank">Fictional Positioning</a> thread.)</blockquote>

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