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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5398338" data-attributes="member: 3820">I think that largely depends on the players. If they're used to things like sword schools as presented in martial arts novels, movies, or the like, it may make more sense that a PC can't learn certain tricks super-easily. Or at least so I've discovered. It probably also depends on the trick as well.And it's easy enough to build NPCs that use variants of PC powers, which really makes it hold together. A PC's encounter power works okay as a monster power many times. That's probably what I'd do if I had players who thought more along those lines.Sure. But to the characters' eyes, I generally feel that they quantify things as fairly less abstract: "this guy is one of the three champions of the Goetic Wars" is more the perception than "this guy is about as tough as that one red dragon we know about." Well, the thing about 4e is that it seems to be more about emulation. One of my favorite powers that an NPC has is an agent from Eberron that has an encounter power that puts the PC at a disadvantage, called "Knowledge Is Power." That power emulates the Dramatic Revelation: it allows an NPC to drop some sudden bit of information on a PC that shocks and surprises, anything from "Fool! The Baron of Redcrest is your true father!" to "You should not defy the Empire -- or did you think we didn't know about your beloved Tamelie?" It models a situation rather than a power, even though it uses power mechanics to resolve the application smoothly. So if a player wanted to learn to do that trick, presumably they'd go and do the research an intelligence agency would on their target, uncover some secret, and then drop it dramatically in combat. The power wouldn't appear on their character sheet, but it would emulate what the agent is doing.I think there's one school of thought where mechanics are meant to simulate the laws of physics of the universe, and another where they're meant to model specific interactions. For instance, racial powers may represent the former, whereas hit points represent the latter: they don't model a physical fact like the tensile strength and density of a character's body, but they do represent the specific interaction of "what happens when someone tries to kill him?" 4e is really all about the latter: the mechanics more frequently focus on modeling on interactions, not defining physical traits.</blockquote>

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