NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zweischneid" data-source="post: 4175122" data-attributes="member: 11843">I don't really think that is the greatest problem. If people get overexited in representing certain narratives in convulated rules, you may be in for a bumpy ride, but you'll still retain that link to what you want to do (tell a fantasy story).Potential disaster lies in the inverse. If you let yourselve guide soley by the need to create a fluid, coherent and logic set of rules that runs like clockwork, but fail to adequatly describe what these rules actually are for (supposed to represent), you run the danger of cutting that very link to the fantasy story and begin doing random and meaningless mathematical operations with your friends around the table. Than you've left engineering, to use your picture, and entred experimental mathematics, i.e. a far more self-referential system of interest only to a far more limited number of people and of only circumstancial relevance for actual application. The feverish debates on "what do hitpoints actually represent" seem, among others, indicative of this risk to me. Or more precicely, the need and desire of people to have guidelines on "how should/can/must I translate a mathematical substraction of hitpoints back into a narration of wounds/fatique/etc suffered by medieval-fantasy heroes delving into a forbidden tomb?". Many of the new powers have raised similar issues, i.e. the reactions of "wow, thats a brilliant & elegant way of solving issue X, that has always bugged me ... but wait ... what does it actually represent 'in-game'? How do I narrate the utilization of this?"Again, experienced players/DM can likely do that without help (and the corresponding threads on Enworld are usually filled with most excellent ideas on how to do it), but an 'easy-to-learn-RPG' should provide pointers for those who don't.4e is taking a very novel approach, building the game from the rules towards the story rather than vice versa, and I both applaud them for doing it and am very excited about seeing the eventual outcome. I just believe that "losing the story" is a potential risk in this approach, and one, we (to my knowledge) haven't really had to face in this extend in roleplaying before.</blockquote>

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