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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6238792" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think it is best to answer these together because this is central to the philosophy of 4e. 4e is designed in such a way as to highly define and nail down the MECHANICAL options of the characters so that the players know exactly what they can and can't do with their powers (and other similar resources) in given situations. The INTENT is that the story aspect of the game is then free to be expressed both in terms of these powers and in whatever other terms the DM and players want. Because the mechanics of the game are so well-defined the DM has a very large toolkit through which to carry out this expression, and he is always free to build on that in various ways. Because it is usually pretty easy to tell what the effects of a given mechanic will be in the game the DM can for example simply give a character some goody for purely story reasons. Because we know what treasures and what their power is generally that are expected we can know what will happen if the DM goes outside those guidelines. Unlike say 1e for instance where it was very hard to know if a +2 sword was stupidly powerful for a 4th level fighter or not, in 4e we do know, and thus we know that if the DM decides to give the 4th level fighter a boon of +2 attack and damage bonus, its appropriate and can be treated like a magic +2 sword. The intent, IMHO, for higher level play is that the DM should be using the rules as just a jumping-off point. Different DMs can go further or not as they please with this. A plain vanilla 4e 30th level Wizard is pretty damned powerful, but his options ARE less open-ended on the face of them than those of a 3.5e 20th level wizard. OTOH ritual magic is totally open-ended in theory, and there is plenty of material in the various books which describe things like curses, rituals, artifacts, and just wacky things that god-level beings do and are (and a 30th level wizard is pretty close to god-like in 4e). Its up to the DM to foster this kind of stuff and up to the players to seek out power beyond what is simply described in the books as given to you. This is a lot different from 3.5 in particular, where it was all spelled out in quite some detail. 4e is more of a toolkit in this sense, something that can go in a lot of directions if the DM and players are willing to use their imaginations. Unfortunately I think this is a trait that even RPGers often lack. I saw a lot of 'by-the-book' high level play that was really pretty uninteresting. In my own games though, things were much different. High level PCs were constantly coming up with all sorts of crazy stuff to do that was not written on a character sheet or contained explicitly in a book. It proved to be pretty fun and not a lot of work. So, its like all games, 4e is a two-edged sword. It can be used to make some very dull games with very limited PCs, or some really crazy games with a lot of easily handled mechanics and a very cool story. You might read all the articles about the Iomandra Campaign that Chris Perkins ran, he did a lot of cool stuff with it at high level.</blockquote>

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