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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5744658" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think different gamers might like a range of different things. The same gamer can like a range of different things. Although at the moment I am GMing 4e, and enjoying it, I can easily envisage enjoying GMing other, different, games - HeroQuest, HARP or Burning Wheel at least. And I can easily imagine playing other, different, games that I wouldn't want to GM myself.I think there is a reasonable amount of evidence that a reasonable number of gamers find combat based on pure hit point attrition boring. My evidence is that many gamers don't play D&D, and many gamers who do play D&D lace it with various more-or-less optional elements that displace hit point attrition, like critical hit systems and save-or-die/suck attacks.I agree all these things can count as failure. I think that D&D, at least since some time during the 2nd ed era, has generally been premised on the assumption that the PCs will succeed. The classic 2nd ed railroading modules (Planescape, Ravenloft etc) achieved this result despite the mechanics, by encouraging the GM to narrate huge swathes of story without regard to them. 4e involves D&D "catching up" with modern developments in game design, that show how expected success can be reconciled with mechanical power and intereseting choices in the hands of the players.You haven't really explained whether by "chance of failure" you mean "opportunity for failure" or "X% probability of failure". In combat in RQ or Traveller there is an X% probability of failure - hence the crapshoot element of combat in those systems. In 4e there is an opportunity for failure, but clever choices can drive the percentage chance very low (probably not arbitrarily low, given we're talking about fairly coarse randomness in action resolution, but very low).This suggests to me that your principal interest is in winning. My own view - frequently posted in these threads - is that 4e doesn't suit that sort of play very well. It's not about the win - it's about the decisions that have to be made, the potentially difficult choices taken, to secure that win. This is why I think that it suits narrativist play. I think it's also why it suits the sort of gamist play that [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] has posted about - where the aim of play isn't to win, but to win by demonstrating "cool moves" using an ever-more complex character. (I see this as a very light and collegial form of gamism. But Balesir can correct me if I'm misdescribing it.)Once the focus of play shifts to the choices made - whether their thematic stakes, or their "coolness" stakes - then that is where the drama will reside. This is what 4e, in my view, supports. How popular is this sort of game? I don't know. Popular enough, I would say, given that 4e seems to be widely played. Given the success of Pathfinder, however, I would guess that it is not as popular as a somewhat more hardcore gamism supported by a more simulationist rules engine. (And, of course, this is a sort of play that I also think was widespread in classic D&D and even 2nd ed times. 3E/PF didn't invent it - it cashed in on its popularity.)Decision points aren't primarily about chances of failure - at least, not in a heroic system like 4e. They're about having to commit, about having to make sacrfices, or - if you're playing in Balesir's style - about trying to come up with the goods to show off to your fellow players.Are these claims based on reading of, or playing, a range of games with various mechanics and approaches? Or are they hypotheses?My claims are based on a mixture of play experience and wide reading. When I read about a game, like Maelstrom Storytelling, being designed to turn play into story in a certain fashion - and then I look at its mechanics, and compare them to the mechanics of different or similar games that I have played - the difference seems fairly clear to me.I regard it as close to obvious that some mechanical systems for action resolution are better at turning play into story than others. Traditional simulationist systems, in my experience, are not very good at this.  I find it obvious - both in theory, from reading the rules, and then in experience that bears out the theory - that 4e will be better at this,  because its mechanics force the players to make decisions in the course of action resolution that have fictional signficance even if their contribution to mechanical success is guaranteed. (This is the point of the reference upthread to skill challenges, which introduce significant drama even if success is guaranteed, because the players have to repeatedly engage the fiction in order to generate sufficient successful skill checks.)Conversely, a system when for all players most of the time the only rational choice is to pour on the damage, is just not producing the same range of drama-generating decision points.Again, I'm not saying that other systems don't produce drama. Just not as often or reliably.And, of course, it remains an open question whether most gamers want drama in their games. The growth of PF relative to 4e suggests that they don't - or, at least, not in the play-into-story fashion that modern indie-influence RPGs use to produce that outcome. They seem to want (i) a higher degree of simulation, and (ii) a greater focus on playing-to-win.4e obviously lacks (i). And if played with (ii) in mind it will degenerate into the proverbial dice rolling boardgame people complain about, because once you're just playing to win, and so don't care about the fiction that is shaped by the decision points, the fiction will drop out of the picture. Because 4e - at least until page 42 is brought into play, and those who are playing to win won't bring page 42 into play because they won't want to empower the GM in such a fashion - tends not to make fictional position central to the mechanics of action resolution in the way that classic D&D does (think White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors as the poster children for fictional-positioning-heavy playing-to-win).If you really see no difference between the way that classic D&D, and its offspring like 3E/PF, produce drama in the game, and the way that indie games and an indie-influenced game like 4e produce drama in the game - and the way those differences are rooted in the mechanics - then indeed we look at RPGs very differently.</blockquote>

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