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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6609102" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Perhaps I should. Perhaps it would also be helpful to be a little bit more clear? It wasn't obvious, from reading that post alone (since, as stated, I missed some of your prior posts) that you actually thought mechanics meant much of anything. It is now obvious that you do, so there's that.Perhaps you shouldn't tell people what to read or not read? The italics and bolding came across as rude. That's all. If you didn't mean to be rude, that's fine, but it felt rude to me. That's what I was trying to say.I believe I have been unclear. In a philosophical sense, I completely agree that "which came first, the narrative or the mechanic?" is (often) a chicken-or-the-egg question.In the context of what exists within the game, however, I think it's quite clear. Nothing--I repeat, *nothing*--exists within the game proper, the game-as-game, unless it has mechanics. If it has no mechanics, it has no existence. It may exist in the play, because play is (far, far, far) more than just mechanics, but it does not exist within the game proper; to make an analogy, "Minsc" did not exist in the game "Baldur's Gate 2" until there was code to *make* him exist, at which point fluff (voice files, for instance) could be applied to those code hooks. Fluff exists outside of "the game" until it has a mechanical hook to attach to. Your ethnicity example is just that. It is written in the book, but it is not "part of the game." It has no meaning, other than what players feel it should have in the actual moments of play. In that sense, it is like the names of the player characters in Clue (or Cluedo, for UK players); their names, and their backstories, are written into the books and such, but those names have no bearing on the game Clue itself. You could literally just replace those names with Yellow, Red, Blue, etc. and the game would play exactly as it had before. People would--almost assuredly--feel different about identifying Red as the killer than they would about identifying Miss Scarlet as the killer, but that feel is something that exists during *play,* not in the the game Clue.Perhaps I am drawing an excessively fine distinction, but I think it's profoundly important--particularly if we're considering a designer's perspective--to separate "the content of the game" (which includes mechanics, and the narrative attached to them) from "all content in the books" (which includes all sorts of stuff that is unrelated to the game), and both of those from "the content of play," which is an infinitely broad horizon of narrative (and, for those amenable to house rules, mechanics as well). I am speaking, exclusively, about the first thing: the content of the game. A narrative, in that sense, does not exist "in the game" until it has a mechanical hook to attach to; otherwise it is, at best, "content of play," and at worst merely content of the books which supports the existence of the other content without actually participating in that other content.Might be a wise idea. And, on the subject of going with wise ideas, before I respond to the meat of your post here, I have two questions I'd like to ask.1: Would you say you have played (very roughly) as much 5e as you have 4e? That is, would you say you have, again in a rough sense, equal familiarity with the two systems, or are you more familiar with one than the other?2: Do you feel that 4e made sufficient distinction between different classes, or not, and either way, why?</blockquote>

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