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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4113340" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed.I share your dislike.On the substantive point, rewards for acting in character aren't necessarily at odds with narrativism, provided that the player is in charge of, and able to shape the character. (More on this below.)I'm one of those who has been looking for vanilla narrativist potential in D&D 4e.  I didn't come away from Rodney Thompson's blog quite as dissuaded on that idea as you have.Narrativism doesn't necessarily require the game's actual reward mechanics to reward the players for moving the story or evolving their characters - the reward from vanilla narrativist play may come in a broader sense of the game allowing for pleasurable play of a certain sort. But narrativist play does depend upon it being possible to play the game satisfactorily while moving the story or evolving the characters, and this requires that other aspects of the game (including its actual reward mechanics) not get in the way.The rules for non-combat challenges have that potential, depending on the nature of the reward and the degree of empowerment of players in determining the parameters of a challenge and the effects of using various skills.Levelling up needn't get in the way of this: for example, we are told that there will be retraining rules. If these allow a player, upon level up, to swap skill training feats in and out, then (given that skill bonus, and thus skill used to resolve non-combat challenges equals half level plus stat plus skill training), levelling up becomes an opportunity for a player to change the skills whereby s/he will respond to non-combat challenges, and hence to engage in an exercise of, and facilitate future exercises of, narrative control.The combat example is a perhaps a bit more unhappy for narrativism, with the paladin apparently being mechanically penalised for making a thematic choice. It may be that a lot of thematic choices get made at the point of character build, however, rather than action resolution, and depending on the range of powers to choose from, the frequency of level-up and the details of the retraining rules this needn't be all bad.And even within the confines of the paladin example, the choice to keep fighting rather than hunt the shield did generate temporary hit points, reducing the degree of mechanical penalty. Depending on the precise to-hit chances of monsters at that level, and the degree of expected AC for a paladin, it may be that the mechanical penalty was very slight or perhaps even non-existent.</blockquote>

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