Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5570365" data-attributes="member: 27160">Excellent - thanks!  This brief description tells me much more clearly what you actually meant than a term that AbdulAlhazred, in the post following yours, clearly uses to mean something quite different.Taking this description I can now actually agree or disagree with your original remark.  And I disagree, because I don't see that "solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to best advantage" is necessarily antithetical to imagining a fictional space or identifying with your character's role.  Maybe you find it difficult - that would be a good reason for you to dislike all games with a tactical focus - but not everyone does.Blow me!  I have been betrayed by my own brain!  I have not really been thinking what I, er, thought I was thinking all this time!  Aaaagh - I'm going mad!Or, um, wait - did you mean "for you"?The grid is not the game setting.  The grid is a communication mechanism, nothing more.  Different communication mechanisms work better for some people than for others.  If the grid and minis don't work for you, fine - but claiming that they work poorly for everyone is simply false.Ah, this mythical "fiction" again.  The "fiction" can have no primacy over anything since it has no independent existence.  It consists of a mental model of the game setting in each players' mind.  These models are coordinated (assuming things are working well) through communications between the players - often using a set of understandings, shorthands and background knowledge that they have communicated previously and that forms the "canon" for their game.  Adding to or changing these models is done by the players, each for their own model.  Saying "the rules have primacy over the fiction" simply means "this is an alien world where the rules define how the world works, not the players' preconceived ideas or arbitrarily selected parallels to the real world".  This is a perfectly valid way to play.  It's not the only way - having rules that are essentially "the players may add things to the world models based on their own tastes and views of what the game world should be like" also works, provided that clear rules exist for who has authority to add what and how.  But it is a valid way, and it can be quite compatible with roleplaying, both as you explain it and as AbdulAlhazred explains it.Wheras with "I attack with a Spinning Sweep" or "I attempt to perform a Footwork Lure" it's not!?!?What is physically happening is that you are rolling dice and consulting tables/comparing values; none of these action descriptions relate directly to that.  All of the descriptions relate to the game-world model in the players' heads, not to what is physically happening.  But you object to one set and not the others?  Colour me baffled.If the statement of the character's action is decoupled from the world model it fails utterly as a game device, since it cannot, by definition, change the situation in the model if it is decoupled from it.  Statements of a character's action do change the model - that is their very raison d'être - ergo they cannot be decoupled from the model.You trip on the stairs but manage to grab the handrail, spraining your ankle rather than plunging head first down the steps - is that a "success" or a "failure"?After it is explained what "I polymorph the XXX" means you readily interpret it whenever it comes up in the game, and yet for some reason the phrase "is rendered prone" cannot be incorporated into the game lexicon in the same way?Seriously - you have problems with how 4E treats, well, just about everything, as far as I can tell.  I get that - it's fine.  But it's just not universal - in fact, in my own gaming group of eight people it doesn't seem to be a problem at all.  We play D&D 4E and we roleplay - both in and out of combat, and by both your description of "roleplay" and AbdulAlhazred's.  It's clearly not that hard, even if it doesn't suit you.Quite right - you explained what you mean, and this isn't it.  But then it isn't what AbdulAlhazred means by it, either (as I know because he explained what he meant by it, too - and it was different from what you mean, thus explaining why I think these short explanations are far more useful than the term itself).  In fact, I don't recall anyone saying that this is what "roleplaying" means to them, so I'm not sure what your point is?</blockquote>

Verification