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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5845143" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with your diagnosis of those aspects of the fictional situation that 4e doesn't care about - which cashes out the footnote in your first post.I think it's somewhat up for grabs whether or not this means that 4e doesn't care about what a character is doing: "I'm running over here and attacking them all with my Sweeping Blow" is a description of what is being done, although it's not as specific as the description that you provide.For me that is not an issue, as I generally don't care to get into that level of detail about hand-to-hand combat: in RM or RQ, for example, in my group we don't specify the details of attacks beyond attack numbers and parry numbers, and we wouldn't allow someone to get an attack bonus simply by saying "I attack high" while at the same time the defending character says "I parry low" - that sort of thing is meant to be encapsulated in the die rolls.But I think it does help explain why terrain and movement are so important in 4e combat. Without them, a lot of the fictional position would disappear. It would just be a series of mechanical exchanges without needing to consider the fiction. (A related technique that I use to reinforce fictional positioning is to often use crappy/sketchy maps, that carry the minimum necessary info but require the players to imagine and engage with the fictional situation in order to appreciate the range of options for their PCs. This technique also has the advantage that crappy maps are easy to produce on the spot!)Building on this, I think there is a certain tendency to mechanically "regularise" terrain in the 4e rules. I think mechanical consistency can help, but I like an approach in which the non-mechanical (ie fictional) properties of the terrain remain central, and are referenced in play. There are some good examples of this in E1 (which I'm currently reading through in anticipation of running bits and pieces of it) - for example, slopes which cause additional forced movement downwards.The fact that conjurations and zones ignore the terrain they are in pushes against the importance of fictional positioning, and to compensate for this I think it is important to make sure that their keywords matter to the terrain that they are summoned into (eg a wall of fire in a library should burn books, icy terrain can be used to cross a stream, etc).At this level of generality, you're describing games from Basic D&D (where the DC is a stat check or a % roll) through to Rolemaster/HARP (which has about 10 levels of difficulty that can apply to any given check).The fact that the fictional situation is reduced, for the purposes of action resolution, to a die roll with a certain (and known or calculable) likelihood of success doesn't mean that the fictional situation has become irrelevant.</blockquote>

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