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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5568379" data-attributes="member: 42582">My drawing a contrast between the facing/prone issue, and the movement over the battlefield issue, is very deliberate. Accepting AbdulAlhazred's point that this is at best a generalisation of tendency, it is true as a general rule that 4e is indifferent to the fiction of facing etc. Just as AD&D (like 4e) is, as a general rule, mechanically indifferent to whether or not a PC is left or right handed (though a post in the Dragon magazine Forum somewhere around issue 90 to 100 suggested a way of overcoming this mechanical indifference). I think AbdulAlhazred is right that, even if a given piece of fiction may in principle become salient at any time, in most RPGs for most of the time quite a bit of the fiction is merely colour.But 4e is very obviously not indifferent to the fiction of terrain on a battlefield. Terrain on a 4e battlefield is a fictional element that PCs routinely interact with as the players constitute a shared imaginative space with respect to it, and thereby generate consequences for the mechanics (cover, lighting, distance, concealment, etc).The comparison of this to Snakes and Ladders is, I think, no more apt than comparison of 1st ed AD&D stronghold building to Monopoly (which is to say, in my view, not very apt). I don't think Snakes and Ladders supports players trying to disintegrate the snakes, or climb back up them. When the focus is on terrain, rather than facing and body shape, I think that 4e demonstrates precisely the traits that P1NBACK is using to distinguish a RPG from a board game.Balesir's point about expert knowledge and aesthetics is also something I find interesting.LostSoul's posts about 4e before he started running his hack taught me a good chunk of what I know about how to run it. His posts since he started running his hack are very interesting too, but are in some ways less useful to me because I don't know much about positioning in combat and have no particular interest in improving my understanding. For me it is just colour, and I'm quite happy that way.On the other hand, many RPGs treat politics, society, religion, ethics and myth as just colour. But this is the subject matter that I do care about, and that is a good chunk of what actually appeals to me about fantasy RPGing. This is where my aesthetic sensibility and my expertise overlap. This is what my game tends to focus on. The function of combat, for me, is to be a locus of and representation of conflict (just as the classic Hulk comics from the 70s are about the Freudian conflict theory of the mind, although they use 4-colour punch ups to represent this). Given this, I'm somewhat indifferent to how the fiction treats or responds to facing, or handedness. 4e's emphasis on terrain, on the other hand, gives me easy material to work with - to give some very obvious examples, it makes it easy to set up situations where rescue scenarios, or "Do I move myself into this dangerous situation?" scenarios, can be vividly brought to life. It also supports party play in combat - whether that's party harmony or party conflict - very nicely, because physical proximity/separation is an immediately accessible and interesting aspect of interpersonal interaction.There are other games that could also give me what I want, I'm sure, and in certain respects might be even better (though perhaps in others not as strong). But the notion that fiction, and fictional positioning, are irrelevant to 4e because facing, body shape, etc typically don't have a mechanical impact, is one that I really can't agree with.</blockquote>

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