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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7523730" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I don't follow. I was simply noting that having tiers of play being a such a central game concept was not in other versions of the game. No, I totally agree that's how 4E was designed. Not liking something isn't the same as not understanding something. You are, of course, quite free to think differently.I don't think I ignored it, I disagreed with it, at least from the Gygaxian naturalism perspective that I was describing. I noted, more than once, that minionization can be game mechanically useful. However, if one takes something like naturalism even remotely seriously, minionization is problematic: Purportedly the same creature has drastically different stats. A regular ogre can take quite a beating but a minion ogre is a one hit wonder. Fights between two ogres who are regular can last a while while fights between two minions involve a bunch of misses and one messy death. To many people, this feels quite wrong. I understand the reason for why it's used, much as swarms are used to represent hordes of weenie monsters. However, I felt it was all too often very arbitrarily applied. A naturalist perspective assumes that there's an external (albeit fictional), largely self-consistent world separate from the PCs. The 4E perspective (call it anti-naturalist I guess) is very much that the only value elements in the game have is how they interact with the PCs. If something doesn't interact with the PCs it pretty much doesn't deserve stats at all. Hence most NPCs not having any stats. One can take naturalism way too far, with 3E's stat blocks being a prime example. For me, 4E went way too far the opposite way.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7523730, member: 6873517"] I don't follow. I was simply noting that having tiers of play being a such a central game concept was not in other versions of the game. No, I totally agree that's how 4E was designed. Not liking something isn't the same as not understanding something. You are, of course, quite free to think differently. I don't think I [I]ignored[/I] it, I [I]disagreed[/I] with it, at least from the Gygaxian naturalism perspective that I was describing. I noted, more than once, that minionization can be game mechanically useful. However, if one takes something like naturalism even remotely seriously, minionization is problematic: Purportedly the same creature has drastically different stats. A regular ogre can take quite a beating but a minion ogre is a one hit wonder. Fights between two ogres who are regular can last a while while fights between two minions involve a bunch of misses and one messy death. To many people, this feels quite wrong. I understand the reason for why it's used, much as swarms are used to represent hordes of weenie monsters. However, I felt it was all too often very arbitrarily applied. A naturalist perspective assumes that there's an external (albeit fictional), largely self-consistent world separate from the PCs. The 4E perspective (call it anti-naturalist I guess) is very much that the [I]only[/I] value elements in the game have is how they interact with the PCs. If something doesn't interact with the PCs it pretty much doesn't deserve stats at all. Hence most NPCs not having any stats. One can take naturalism way too far, with 3E's stat blocks being a prime example. For me, 4E went way too far the opposite way. [/QUOTE]

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