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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6299185" data-attributes="member: 42582">The numbers written in the "level" box don't matter, of course. What matters is the actual experience of play, and hence (from the design point of view) the mechanics that engender that experience.Using 4e combat as an example: a typical level-N monster or NPC has more hp than a typical PC of the same level, and does more damage per hit than a typical PC of that level would with at-will attacks. However, players playing have the benefit of "deeper" resources than the GM does when playing NPCs and monsters: their rationed abilities (dailies, encounter powers, action points) are better; they have a "unconscious rather than dead at 0 hp" buffer; and they have access to healing surges which, once unlocked, enable them to regain lost hp more effectively than NPCs and monsters can.This is how 4e implements the "contrivances" of dramatic fiction: lucky strikes that just eke out victory, and turn-of-the-tide comebacks when the protagonists seemed to be on the ropes.Simply using lower-level PCs in place of on-level monsters won't produce the same dynamic: it will make headaches for the GM (who has to run a large number of more complex characters) while removing the asymmetry between the GM-side and the player-side that produces the contrivances.The approach you describe would work fine in an attrition-based resolution system, but a system of that sort is probably already forfeiting dramatic resolution for some other goal.A non-4e example that illustrates the same idea of asymmetry is Marvel Heroic RP: the "currency" that passes between GM and players is plot points, but (crudely put) for the GM a plot point is worth only a bonus d6, whereas for the players a plot point can easily be worth a bonus d8 or more. Thus the PCs and not the villains, overall, get the lucky breaks. (A difference between MHRP and 4e is that a MHRP character sheet can be run as either a PC or an NPC, because the asymmetry is located in the non-PC-specific plot point/doom pool rules. Whereas in 4e a lot of it is embedded into a particular characters power load-out and hit point and healing surge totals. In this respect 4e carries on the D&D tradition of being fiddlier than your average RPG.)Is there much evidence for this? Tunnels & Trolls and the classic TSR Marvel Super Heroes RPG are both examples cited by Ron Edwards of systems that can be played either in Gamist or Narrativist fashion. I think 4e is another example - it lends itself pretty well to a light narrativism, but also to a light gamism. And Champions is a game which, while perhaps simulationist in its surface sensibilities, is able to be drifted in both gamist (point-buy min-max!) and narrativist directions.Your own paraphrases show why this is so - the same techniques that are used to set up an arena of challenge to be resolved by the players in a show of luck and skill (gamism) can be used to set up a moment of dramatic conflict to be resolved by the players in a display of what they care about emotionally in the game (narrativism). In both cases a clear difference from simulationist play is that the arena/moment is set up. Simulationist play tends to incline towards naturalistic emergence of ingame situations. Sim play won't give you Helm's Deep as Tolkien wrote it, but it won't give you White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors either. For some examples of D&D modules that I think could lend themselves to narrativism as much as gamism, I would mention the D series and Night's Dark Terror.Not knowing the books I can't comment on your exchange with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] about this, but if a character survives as a protagonist for "a book or two" then I think that is highly comparable to a D&D PC, and not an instance of killing off characters willy-nilly. I don't know how many of these books there are, but most characters in most fiction don't exist for more than "a book or two".</blockquote>

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