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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5734961" data-attributes="member: 42582">No. I don't even know if Encounters runs in Melbourne. I'm just going on my impression from this forum and from the WotC site. My sense of Encounters is that it is railroady (because the adventure has to progress in a certain way) and that the players are able to have little or no longterm effect on the fiction (because the adventure has to be pick-up-able on a week-by-week basis).Assuming these impressions are right, they suggest that Encounters is a game in which the fiction makes almost no difference apart from providing a bit of colour to the overall experience, and perhaps affecting some points of tactical resolution (eg if the hindering terrain is a swamp rather than a sand pit, the GM might look more favourably on my PC's attempt to use a raft to help get over it).Whereas I think the strengths of 4e are precisely that it supports non-railroady (but non-exploratory) play in which the fiction, and the players' effect upon the fiction, is central. Or to put it another way: if 4e has strengths, it is in introducing indie-RPG design sensibilities into an otherwise mainstream heroic fantasy RPG, whereas Encounters seems like a format which makes almost no room for those indie sensibilities to display themselves.Sure. And - depending on how these are run - they might be better than my impression of Encounters.My books aren't in front of me, so for me you've posed a test of memory rather than of comprehension. And the first thing that comes to my mind is the advice, in the XP section of Gygax's DMG, to rank each player's performance in each adventure from 1 (best) to 4 (worst) and then to generate an average, in order to work out how many weeks of training are needed by that player's PC to gain a level.The grounds for those rankings spell out an implicit role for each class - the manner in which a player is expected to play them. As  I said I don't have my books in front of me, but my memory is that fighters are expected to take the front line and do tough things, clerics are expected to heal and provide support, thieves are expected to be stealthy and skullduggerous, and MUs are expected to apply spells and intellect to the solution of problems. Conversely, a fighter who cowers, a cleric who refuses to heal, or a thief or MU who behaves like a typical fighter will score poorly in the rankings, and have to spend a lot more gold to undertake his/her level training.Again from memory, Gygax's roles are expressed primarily by reference to combat activity - fighting, healing, etc - although (particularly when it comes to thieves and MUs) the more generic notion of "resolving problems" is to the fore. I don't see a radical difference in this respect from 4e, as far as the content and scope of the roles are concerned. In the 4e PHB, for example, it is rangers, rogues, wizards and warlocks who have the greater share of non-combat utility powers, meaning that for them their mechanically-supported role extends beyond combat to "problems" more generally, just as Gygax suggested for thieves and MUs in his DMG.The are two obvious differences from 4e, but they don't pertain to the content and scope of the roles. Rather, they are that (i) in 4e information about roles is provided to the player, not the GM, and (ii) in 4e it takes the form not of advice about criteria a player must satisfy in order to progress in the game, but rather advice about approaches a player might adopt in order to do well at/enjoy the game. I think both these differences are indicative of broader differences in tone and style between classic D&D and 4e. (Sometimes these differences are expressed using the phrase "player entitlement". Given that overall I'm a fan of these differences, though, that's not the phrase that I personally would use!)</blockquote>

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