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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6299203" data-attributes="member: 42582">I was addressing your particular mechanical solution.But I can reiterate the "lame to fight weak monsters point" too, if that will help: in a simulationist system, there is typically some sort of correlation between mechanical stats (be that AC and hp, points spent in building, whatever the relevant measure in the system at hand) and ingame puissance. In these sorts of games, being a 1d4 hp kobold or giant rat means something - it means that you're weak within the fiction.Likewise, typically, for levels on characters. So the 5th level PCs constantly fighting 2nd level enemies means that the PCs are constantly beating up on their inferiors - those levels correspond to an ingame state of affairs too. (It would be like Superman spending his time beating up on some of The Flash's less impressive enemies, like Heat Wave and The Top.)4e - again, just to pick one salient example - decouples stats and ingame status in certain ways. For instance, a monster can have 1 hp for action resolution purposes yet be, within the fiction, a fearsome monster (eg a 17th level Frost Giant minion). 4e also uses swarm mechanics to model large numbers of smaller and/or lesser foes, which helps make fights between the PCs and small armies mechanically satisfying to resolve, playing more like a typical D&D combat and less like a book-keeping wargame.It need not be. There can be other ways of establishing asymmetries. I mentioned one in my earlier post - the asymmetric "currency" of plot points in MHRP. In Burning Wheel, to give another example, players are expected to have access to more "fate points" than the GM, and hence to have an advantage over typical NPCs and monsters. As I said, 4e is somewhat distinctive in building the asymmetry into the basic elements of PC building.Until you tell me more about how encounters are being framed, I don't really know what the meaning of "merit" and "system bias" are here. For instance, if you as a GM only send 2nd level NPCs against your 4th level PCs (so as not to overload the odds of TPK) then how is that not a "system bias", just manifesting itself not in the character build mechanics (as in 4e) or the resolution mechanics (as in BW or MHRP) but in the encounter building system?I'm also not really sure what you mean by "contrivance". For instance, I suggested upthread that readily available Raise Dead is a pretty obvious contrivance intended to facilitate a fairly common style of D&D play. Bags of Holding are contrivances too, at least in a system in which XP gained is proportionate to pounds of gold carried out of the dungeon! (In my 4e game, by contrast, the only PC to have an X of holding is the fighter, who needs a Handy Haversack to store one of the two-handed weapons that he switches between while wielding the other one. I don't see that as a contrivance in the same way.)</blockquote>

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