D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's an interesting theory, at least. It's not one which I particularly care to try and refute, and I'll be looking for evidence to support that theory whenever I end up reading relevant source material.

It's also entirely tangential to the point at hand, of course. The origin of any gameplay element has little impact on its current usage.

Yeah, that's more-or-less true, but it often helps to clarify things when you understand their history and how they came about. See I was there, at least I was a wargamer in the era before RPGs. I was YOUNG and didn't get to play a lot of these sorts of games before D&D came along, but I'm familiar with the culture and even after we started playing D&D we still made up fantasy war games, or played Chainmail, etc with armies of 15mm figures (I still have a bunch of them). Someone would make up a world with a bunch of 'kingdoms', 'races' or whatever, and we'd work out how big each player's armies were and someone would referee the whole thing, decide how logistics worked, etc. D&D was of course the preferred mechanism for handling the various details.

In fact it was only gradually from around 1974 up to about 1978 that things solidified into the type of play that exists now which is parties of adventurers. Before that it was all mostly each 'PC' was some sort of 'army general' and they all tried to conquer each other! As more people joined the hobby they were less interested in the wargame part and 'classic' D&D took shape as we know it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you think it would have changed things if the very small, extraordinarily cogent Gamesmaster section for Dungeon World would have been the preeminent advice in 4e? If just pages 163-167, very slightly 4e-ified) would have been in DMG1 (as the abridged version of GMing 4e), I really think it might have made a dent in some of the volatility 4e received. I'm not saying it would have changed the ultimate outcome, but I think it would have at least smoothed out/softened the transition of some GMs, of a certain persuasion, to the game (and certainly changed the nature of some of the edition warring!).

Yes, I think the presentation and exposition of 4e was anywhere from pretty good to woefully inadequate on various topics. It certainly could have been better.

Your comments on the pitfalls of process-sim (and the reference to Classic Traveller, a game thoroughly steeped in process-sim) was pretty cogent. I'd only like to add that ironically Traveller was a good game for teaching me early on the benefits of the simpler and lighter rules. While it isn't exactly a 'rules lite' game it does actually have a pretty simple and uniform core mechanics with very few frills. There's a LARGE infrastructure of 'detail generators' and subsystems for things like starships, but at its core was this simple engine. In a way Traveller was a game that was born too early. It probably would have succeeded with a lot of us much better had it been born in a more modern era with graded levels of success, fail forward, and some 'plot point' mechanics. That and a chargen system that injected some story in amongst the bare numbers. I'm still fond of it in a way, though I don't think I would play it in its existing form anymore, largely for the reasons you've outlined.

Presentation is quite important, yes. You touched on the visual presentation of information in 4e, which uses a very different theory and style than previous editions. I'm sure it was a factor in some player's acceptance or rejection of the game. It suited me well, so I liked the change, and since I wasn't really particularly an active D&D player at the time of 4e's advent, and didn't have any investment in 3e at all, FOR ME there really wasn't anything much to unlearn, just old 2e-era understandings of the game. Those did take a while to really crumble.

 

[Starfox]

I disagree, every character is a protagonist, at the very least they've got their own little part of the story. Maybe they're a bit player but they have a story. The rules of drama always apply to any story.

I saw this game style labeled as "protagonism" and it is the play style I prefer. Players and GM co-author a story. The general flow is that the GM makes up the structure of they story, making the disposition and storyline of the book. The players fill the paragraphs with actual content.

 

[Argyle King]

Before getting to the rest of what I say here, I want to be honest and say that I very likely missed 20-30 pages of the conversation. I responded a while back and a few people asked me questions, but I just now got around to addressing some of my thoughts. So, I apologize if any of what is found below turns out to be a rehash.

Somewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my favorite thing about 4E was the cosmology and some of the background info. In many cases, I highly enjoyed the 'story' (for a lack of better words) behind the elements of 4E. My two favorite 4E books are the preview books.

For me personally, where 4E sometimes fell flat was when trying to match that story and the picture it painted in my head to the mechanics of the game. I'm not suggesting the mechanics were 'bad.' In some cases, they were good, but -for me personally- they didn't always map well to the story. There were very often times when the crunchy part of the game and the fluffy part of the game seemed to be telling my brain two very different stories about what was going on. In my opinion, the most successful job of DMing 4th I ever pulled off was when I ran a game in a homebrew world which looked nothing at all like the typical D&D setting. (It's also worth mentioning that I somewhat heavily modified Encounter XP budgets, how Elites & Solos were built, and Skill Challenges.) While they were changes that the players couldn't often see, I feel that I -as the DM- could see changes in the enjoyment level of the players, and I myself enjoyed running the game far more.

I don't want to give the impression that I dislike 4th Edition. I will openly admit to there having been a time when I'd go so far as to say I learned to hate the game, and my dislike was such that I credit 4th with finally pushing me across the threshold of trying different systems outside of the d20 family. However, it was through trying those other systems and learning that (in my opinion) different systems often (whether intentionally or unintentionally) lend themselves towards different aspects of play either better or worse that I learned to appreciate what I felt 4E did well. Once I learned that, I re-learned how to use the game to produce better results. I believe a big problem with 4E was the marketing. The whole 'ze game will remain ze same' push put an idea in my head about how to run the game which I feel was flawed because it was based on assumptions and ideologies about game design which were at odds with the ones 4th was built upon.

...it's also worth mentioning that 3rd Edition was my first exposure to D&D, so, at times, I've had to consider whether some of my fond memories were based upon ignorance concerning how else something might be handled or done. That's not in any way a knock against 3rd. I'm simply expressing that the person and player I am today has had a much greater variety of experience with rpgs than the person I was when I first started playing tabletop rpgs. As well, through having different experiences, I feel that I've come to better understand what my own likes and dislikes are.

If I recall correctly, the previous response I had to this thread mentioned that I had wanted 4E to turn out more like sword & sorcery than mythic fantasy. I have no problem with mythic fantasy; it is something I can (and often do) enjoy, but it's not what I wanted nor was it what I imagined in my mind when thinking upon the early previews of the 'Points of Light' concept.

I believe someone asked me what setup I believe would have turned out more like what I expected. I'm honestly not entirely sure. I can point out a few things that I think may have made a difference; I can point out a few of the areas which somewhat broke my mind, but I cannot say exactly. The reason I feel I cannot say exactly is because I believe some of the changes I would personally make would break some of the things which define D&D as D&D, and I don't see that as being valuable input for a conversation about D&D. Still, I will do my best to express some of my opinion.

I think the biggest stumbling block for me was how laughable and pathetic the monsters and adversaries seemed to be in 4E. In time this is something which was somewhat fixed by changing how monsters were built, but that didn't fix all of the issues. Where it was most highlighted for me was in how Monster Math interacted with Game World Math compared to how PC Math compared to Game World Math. In some scenarios, it's trivial for a PC to leap over small buildings; smash through a gate of hell, or enduring a long arduous journey through a desert, or do enough damage to blow through a brick wall with a power. Meanwhile, there are times when some of the creatures which the story of the game paints as being the most feared struggle to perform simple physical tasks. Without going into a ton of detail (because I have several times before in older threads,) I'll mention that there are three experiences which stick out in my head when I consider this: 1) The party I was in at the time killing Strahd so easily that I don't believe he ever got to do anything beyond moving a few squares; 2) DMing an encounter in which the PCs literally broke an encounter by dealing damage to the surrounding structure; 3) The first campaign to 30 ending when the party was so lopsidedly crushing Orcus that the DM felt it was actually reasonable that he'd surrender to an intimidation check mid-combat.

Of those three, it's actually the second one which bothered me the most because it was the hardest to fix. The other two got better after some of the monster math improved and after I made a few changes to how I build monsters. Figuring out how to change the numbers that the game world was built upon was tougher, and I got to a point where it required too much work for me to feel it was worth it. I was fine with monsters and pcs being built differently; that made sense to me in many ways. However, it was odd to me that PCs seemed to be so far advanced beyond the game world while monsters struggled against it. So, as I reach the end of this thought, I think I would have enjoyed 4th more had the PCs felt like they were part of the game world rather than being so far above it. I'm fine with PCs being heroes, and I'm fine with PCs being able to do things which others can't, but there were times in my 4E experience where the PCs seemed so far removed from the world that it was hard to buy into why they would care about it or why they would take some threats seriously.

That being said, I then have to look back at 3rd and realize that the same problem also existed there -even if it existed in different ways. I was often someone who wanted to take the Leadership feat and do things like building a castle and having followers. It was a bit of a buzzkill when I came to realize that it was virtually impossible for any number of my followers in 3rd to be able to contribute to anything which would be a challenge at my level. In fact, at higher levels, my 3rd Edition characters could reasonably fight the armies of nations and win. This realization lead to unusual manners of play in which it was better to take something like the Leadership feat and use it to have an 'army' of craftsmen and artisans to make equipment for my character. At that point, I was no longer playing a fantasy game; I was being the D&D equivilent of Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark with a company full of people building gadgets for me. While I find both characters entertaining, that's not what I was going for.

Simply put: I'd rather see breadth of play. I'd like to see a game of more of an ability to expand my options horizontally rather than the repeated stacking of numbers upon numbers in a vertical manner. I'd like to see high level heroes leading armies rather than fighting them; even Conan needed help sometimes.
In many ways, I feel that 4th was actually an improvement here because there was less of a power curve between levels, but monsters and PCs seemed to be too often worlds apart in what their capabilities were when compared to the world they lived in.

I would have liked to see the disease track mechanic used for a lot more things in 4th. I feel it could have covered a lot more situations and it could have added a level of granularity to 4th -making the system appear a bit more grounded- without adding much more in the way of bookkeeping. For example, instead of saves being so much of a binary thing (pass/fail,) saves could have been handled using a track. This would give room for a variety of options beyond just pass/fail, and, really, there are already many things in 4E which work in a similar manner by saying things along the lines of "after the first failed save..." From a story and drama perspective, I believe it would have made things more dramatic as well. Imagine the holy paladin locked in a struggle; his faith bolstering him against the ongoing effects of an evil lich's curse rather than one roll and done. From a mechanics perspective, I also believe it would have fixed a lot of problems by not having saves be so binary in nature; in particular, the orb wizard ability from PHB1 wouldn't have been so problematic.

I believe the disease track idea could have been used for things such as crafting too. Say you have a broken sword. This could be treated as a 'disease' for the item. Success by a certain amount on the track (which would require a roll against an appropriate skill and money/resources) would move you toward the repaired end of the track; a roll that doesn't meet the target number keeps things the same; a roll that fails by a certain amount means you somehow messed it up and made the condition worse. That might be a pretty lame example, but my point is that some of the mechanics which were already part of the 4E system could have been used in different ways to provide a different experience. I'm a little unsure of why some of the mechanics of the game were used so little. On a side note, I also would have liked this because it would have felt a little bit like a mini skill challenge; I feel like that would have gone a long way toward not making skill challenges seem like some kind of separate mini-game; often, the transition from 'regular mode' to 'skill challenge mode' felt awkward.

That brings me to the next part of 4E which sometimes felt off. I often hear people talk about grind when discussing 4E, but, for me, skill challenges were more often a source of grind than combat. Most often, it seemed as though the party would realize they were in a skill challenge and then discuss among themselves which party member was best suited for each part of the task. At that point, it turned into just a bunch of rolling. Thankfully, the group I typically play in has a DM who is a pretty gifted story teller, so he'd put effort into painting the scene and making it seem less tedious. On a personal level, my technique was to simply not openly tell the party they were in a skill challenge. So, I did find ways to make this better, but there were still times when the transition into a skill challenge was a bit jarring. I think skill challenges were a good idea, but, much like other things I already mentioned, I felt they were too binary. As I became more experienced with 4th Edition, I started to design skill challenges in a different way.

Toward the end of 4E, I very rarely followed the official advice for skill challenges. I stopped thinking in terms of X successes before Y failures. In some cases, my design for a skill challenge was such that I had a certain number of rolls allowed in mind. For an easy example, let's say I decided upon 10 rolls. Barring some kind of catastrophic failure or some action which prevented the PCs from continuing to try, there was no failure limit. Instead, the amount of success and amount of failure would be considered against the desired outcome. 10 successes would be the best result; 10 failures would be the worst result, and there would be a variety of other results in between. All things considered, I suppose this is pretty similar to how the disease track works, but the method of determining the result was a bit different. It's also an idea I came up with after playing GURPS and being exposed to the ideas of 'margin of success' and 'margin of failure.'

In a few other cases, it didn't make sense for me to have a set number of rolls in mind. There was no limit to how many times someone could try other than how much failure they could withstand or how much time was available. An example of this was an encounter I designed in which the party was trying to infiltrate the lair of an evil wizard. There was a particular series of rooms which needed to be gone through in a certain order or else you'd essentially be walking in circles; similar to a tesseract I suppose, but it would be more accurate to say the idea was loosely based upon Bowser's Castle from Super Mario 1. There was no time limit in this case, but the catch was that various failures would set off traps and other ill effects, and those effects did not reset. So, later times travelling through the same area were more hazardous due to the actions (failures) of the party activating more of the traps and various other defense mechanisms.

...it seems to me that I'm again getting off track. I suppose my point is that there are a lot of elements of 4E that I like. I just didn't always like the way those parts were put together, and there are times when it was confusing to me why some mechanics were used and others weren't. I think a lot of the same parts could have been used to produce a very different game had only the mentality behind the design of the game been different. In no way am I intending to say how things turned out were 'wrong.' I simply found that there were often times when the mentality behind the design of the game and the mentality behind the stories I wanted to tell were in conflict, but, the even more noticeable thing that was jarring to me was that the mentality behind the stories of D&D started to seem at odds with the mentality behind how D&D worked. Many people say mechanics don't matter; I personally believe they do in much the same way that choice of medium matters when producing art. The Last Supper is a great piece of art regardless, but I dare to wager that it would evoke a different feeling if made with crayon. Likewise, I believe Bambi would have been a far different experience as a child had Michael Bay directed it.

I still enjoy 4th Edition. It's not always my game of choice, but there are a lot of things I like about it. I honestly believe there are a lot of things that 4th did well enough that it made me almost unable to play 3rd (or Pathfinder.) Still, there are aspects of it that are at odds with what I typically want. I don't have one concrete answer for how to change that. When D&D was my primary game and 4th was the current edition, I did some work on my own to adjust things, and the results seemed to be good, but I eventually learned to accept some aspects of the game for what they were; picking up other games for when I wanted something different.

To answer the thread, the story of 4th was my favorite aspect of 4th Edition. As far all of this other stuff... I think I've actually confused myself as to what I was trying to say, and I'm not even sure any of it adds to the conversation, but what's here contains some of my thoughts toward 4th. Maybe it's worth something; maybe it isn't.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Somewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my favorite thing about 4E was the cosmology and some of the background info. In many cases, I highly enjoyed the 'story' (for a lack of better words) behind the elements of 4E. My two favorite 4E books are the preview books.

I never really read them, but some of the ideas in the preview books did sound like they were a little more 'out there' or more boldly put than what the game ended up with. I think when a bunch of editors and such get hold of a product things tend to get diluted a bit.

If I recall correctly, the previous response I had to this thread mentioned that I had wanted 4E to turn out more like sword & sorcery than mythic fantasy. I have no problem with mythic fantasy; it is something I can (and often do) enjoy, but it's not what I wanted nor was it what I imagined in my mind when thinking upon the early previews of the 'Points of Light' concept.

I must say, I never really was that sold on the 4e version of PoL. I thought it would be much more interesting as a sort of 'dark fairy tale' version of the world where your 'point of light' is the only one you can be sure even still exists. Oh, maybe now and then you get some rumors of someone else out there, but it might be no better than some survivors from a town down the road straggling in after the last contact was lost 10 years ago. That kind of thing. The PoL they ended up with didn't seem to be really any different from the old Keep on the Borderlands, there's not a lot of civilization around, but trade and travel are still moderately routine, if a bit dangerous, and 'the wilderness' is rife with monsters, but there's still lots of towns and such.

I think the biggest stumbling block for me was how laughable and pathetic the monsters and adversaries seemed to be in 4E. In time this is something which was somewhat fixed by changing how monsters were built, but that didn't fix all of the issues. Where it was most highlighted for me was in how Monster Math interacted with Game World Math compared to how PC Math compared to Game World Math. In some scenarios, it's trivial for a PC to leap over small buildings; smash through a gate of hell, or enduring a long arduous journey through a desert, or do enough damage to blow through a brick wall with a power. Meanwhile, there are times when some of the creatures which the story of the game paints as being the most feared struggle to perform simple physical tasks. Without going into a ton of detail (because I have several times before in older threads,) I'll mention that there are three experiences which stick out in my head when I consider this: 1) The party I was in at the time killing Strahd so easily that I don't believe he ever got to do anything beyond moving a few squares; 2) DMing an encounter in which the PCs literally broke an encounter by dealing damage to the surrounding structure; 3) The first campaign to 30 ending when the party was so lopsidedly crushing Orcus that the DM felt it was actually reasonable that he'd surrender to an intimidation check mid-combat.

Hmmmm. This is interesting but, epic tier aside, I never was really able to understand why people found this to be the case. I know I found it pretty easy to generate some really vicious encounters without a lot of trouble. Maybe you just had a really hard-core group of optimizers to contend with? It was certainly possible to warp the curve of 4e enough that it could start to degrade the game experience. Beyond that epic solos really were no challenge with a decently on-the-ball group, and were just dull if the group wasn't. I always thought of solo as the 'gonzo levels' anyway though. In any case I don't know about things like skills and whatnot, I never saw the players try things like just breaking through all the walls or something like that. Maybe those rules weren't well-calibrated, but I think maybe they were just calibrated for casual use. The DM and players were perhaps expected to not push that overly far, something that might be considered a fault in game mechanics, but is pretty common in RPGs.

Of those three, it's actually the second one which bothered me the most because it was the hardest to fix. The other two got better after some of the monster math improved and after I made a few changes to how I build monsters. Figuring out how to change the numbers that the game world was built upon was tougher, and I got to a point where it required too much work for me to feel it was worth it. I was fine with monsters and pcs being built differently; that made sense to me in many ways. However, it was odd to me that PCs seemed to be so far advanced beyond the game world while monsters struggled against it. So, as I reach the end of this thought, I think I would have enjoyed 4th more had the PCs felt like they were part of the game world rather than being so far above it. I'm fine with PCs being heroes, and I'm fine with PCs being able to do things which others can't, but there were times in my 4E experience where the PCs seemed so far removed from the world that it was hard to buy into why they would care about it or why they would take some threats seriously.

Yeah, that's again interesting, but I still don't really grasp how the PCs were so far beyond the game world. Again, maybe in epic things can get a bit that way, and epic doesn't IMHO 'just work' out of the box, you do have to put something into it. I'd have to personally say though that, as you have noted too, it held together pretty well when measured against other games.

That being said, I then have to look back at 3rd and realize that the same problem also existed there -even if it existed in different ways.
[/quote]
Yeah, 3.xE is like shooting fish in a barrel, much past 5th level it is completely out to lunch. You can play out to say maybe level 12 if the players are VERY cooperative and actively hold back, but it is really pretty borked when you look close.

Simply put: I'd rather see breadth of play. I'd like to see a game of more of an ability to expand my options horizontally rather than the repeated stacking of numbers upon numbers in a vertical manner. I'd like to see high level heroes leading armies rather than fighting them; even Conan needed help sometimes.
In many ways, I feel that 4th was actually an improvement here because there was less of a power curve between levels, but monsters and PCs seemed to be too often worlds apart in what their capabilities were when compared to the world they lived in.

Yeah, I thought 4e put a bit of a curb on some of the really outlandish PC abilities, that is the most outlandish spells mostly.

I would have liked to see the disease track mechanic used for a lot more things in 4th. I feel it could have covered a lot more situations and it could have added a level of granularity to 4th -making the system appear a bit more grounded- without adding much more in the way of bookkeeping. For example, instead of saves being so much of a binary thing (pass/fail,) saves could have been handled using a track.
[/quote]
Hmmmm, interesting concept, I wonder if this can be fleshed out and if it would hold up?

I believe the disease track idea could have been used for things such as crafting too.

Though here I wonder if what you really want is a progressive effect/success/failure system of some sort that does all of this, can be an SC, can represent non-binary success and conditions, etc. Another thing to consider how it would all go together.

I still enjoy 4th Edition. It's not always my game of choice, but there are a lot of things I like about it. I honestly believe there are a lot of things that 4th did well enough that it made me almost unable to play 3rd (or Pathfinder.) Still, there are aspects of it that are at odds with what I typically want. I don't have one concrete answer for how to change that. When D&D was my primary game and 4th was the current edition, I did some work on my own to adjust things, and the results seemed to be good, but I eventually learned to accept some aspects of the game for what they were; picking up other games for when I wanted something different.

I think this kind of jibes with my '4e needs to be understood and reanalyzed, and a 4.5e would be quite fruitful' stance. I am not sure if we would entirely agree on the things that should have been done to it, but I bet we could agree on a bunch of them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For me, the best thing about 4e wasn't on the list, though I didn't think of it in time to check the "other" box.

The best thing about 4e is its honesty.

I've beaten around the bush on this before, but I'll be direct now: 3e, by comparison, outright lies to the reader. It describes things about its mechanical contents which are provably false. Whether these lies were intentional (e.g. Monte Cook's "ivory tower game design" blog post), or were the designers lying to themselves (e.g. designing a game without realizing that their personal preferences were the only thing keeping it from going utterly haywire), I cannot say. The fact of the matter is, the books and columns and articles and all of that, both implicitly and explicitly, convey descriptions that are false, equalities that do not hold, and a variety of other communication failures. For example, Natural Spell and Toughness are both feats, but one breaks the game in half while the other is so situationally useful as to be an actively bad choice for the vast majority of characters.

4e did away with all that. It showed us how the sausage was made, it didn't (or very, very rarely, *coughBinderandVampirecough*) imply equalities that didn't exist, it generally held most selectable-option resources (powers, feats, skills, etc.) to a good albeit imperfect standard of parity, it advised the player honestly and directly (though their recommended build choices were often crappy, I will admit that). Just...the whole thing was an enormous breath of fresh air for me. I finally felt like I could play D&D by making informed choices, and adapting from my mistakes, rather than having to be a Wizard myself in order to get anything good or useful out of the rules.

 

[innerdude]

Like many, my early days of GMing strived for process simulation (GMed Classic Traveller amongst other games). The reason for this was because I figured that enhanced causal logic and internal consistency would correlate to enhanced player agency, table handling time, and immersion. That turned out to not only be incorrect but the futility of striving for it actually became an impediment.

Meanwhile, relieving the extraneous (beyond what was absolutely necessary and possible) focus from the futile attempt at meaty process-sim improved all of those things (especially handling time) and others. The focus could be recalibrated toward genre coherency/logic, emotional stakes, pacing, and consistent narrative dynamism. We lost nothing of the absolute essentials of internal consistency and causal logic with the removal of the extraneous obsession with intensive granularity. And we gained so much (we being myself and the people I GMed for).

We found that being devotees of intensive, granular process sim did nothing but suck the well of creativity dry because interesting, genre/coherent outcomes become 100 % subordinate to physical causal logic (which naturally contracts the range of potential outcomes and dramatically - hehe? - so).

This is....interesting. I'm trying to compare this to my experiences as a GM, now that I've got some more experience actually under my belt. Up until 2011, In 25+ years of gaming I didn't have the requisite GM experience (nor, frankly the interest or means) to gauge just what exactly my play groups were trying to accomplish during gameplay.

D&D 3.x really does push either a highly "gamist" approach (character build, challenges) that takes little interest in "Story Now" per se, or it tries to subsume the gamism into a semi-coherent "simulationism" that tries to build on idea that because characters and NPCs are built on the same framework, that the whole world can be modeled using the basic PC traits/skills/feats (lol, I almost called feats "Edges," my Savage Worlds immersion has taken deep root).

It really doesn't focus on "Story" as an agenda, other than through illusionism.

But there's another piece to this, which is that I've been highly, highly conscious during my two most recent campaigns (a "traditional " fantasy and a near-future Deus Ex, both using Savage Worlds) of the whole "Say yes or roll the dice" advice. And it's been remarkable what has changed with my group's approach to their characters.

Suddenly, their place in the fiction has come sharply into more focus, because I'm not dithering around with them over mechanical and world-building minutiae. Instead of wasting time trying to "optimize" their character, or find mechanical loopholes to "win" a combat/scene, they are more thoughtfully considering why their character has a purpose in the game at all. And it's actually been very jarring for one of my players (my wife's younger sister), who is so ingrained in adversarial GM style that it's taking her some time to sort it out ("What, you mean you WANT my character to succeed at stuff because it's actually INTERESTING when she does?").

And I agree with you, the idea that slavish adherence to causal process interpreted through "rules as physics" makes it much harder to do that (unless you find a system that can radically streamline that causal process interpretation while still producing plausible results).

For me, 4e just doesn't meet my minimum levels of internal consistency and causal logic. The metagame "proud nails" of 4e are just too frequent and obvious, though at this point I frankly can't even swallow "core" D&D-isms like armor class, hit points, and "Vancian" magic, let alone be bothered to deal with AEDU.

But ultimately, my journey to Savage Worlds was largely driven by the same impulse---I don't want "process sim," I want character-based fictional positioning where the characters have real stakes with what is happening in the fiction. And as you noted, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], that is a wholly independent aim as a GM than simply driving "realistic" results. I've discovered that I'm not terribly interested in "realism"---what I'm really after is "plausibility." And that plausibility may be a result of character interaction with the game world, it may be based on genre tropes, it may be based on mechanical interactions.

So what it is it about 4e that so uniquely pushes characters into fictional positioning "spaces" that allow for this kind of play? Because even having thoroughly engaged with much of [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's descriptions, I still have a hard time understanding how players selecting a bunch of powers/exploits/spells drives this.

I know Savage Worlds works in this way because 1) the underlying core mechanic makes plausible "process sim" elegant and easy, and 2) characters generally have more freedom to build their character the way they want (free-form, skill-based advancement vs. class and level). If a character doesn't fit into the player's "vision" it's absolutely no one's fault but their own; there's no "accidental" choosing the wrong class, etc. Players get to really define their own vision for a character, and resolving those character actions mechanically is fast, elegant, and produces plausible results the majority of the time.

Because I'm not worrying about mechanical resolution issues, I have huge amounts of freedom as a GM to focus my energies on the fiction.

But how does 4e do it?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

A lot of 2nd ed material (and its predecessor material, like Dragonlance) aimed at that sort of play, but lacked any techniques for delivering it other than GM force (often deployed illusionistically). 4e provides the resources to achieve it without illusionism.

That's a matter of perspective. Some 2E material might have said that it was aimed at that sort of play, but the mechanics didn't actually back it up.

You could say that 2E set a goal which it couldn't reach, and 4E was able to reach that goal. Or you could say that the gameplay which 2E supported was not what was implied by its stated goal. A lot of people liked 2E for what it was, rather for what it claimed to be.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So, what you're saying is then that E. Gary Gygax was the world's leading genius on ecological relationships and worked out how many orcs, trolls, bugbears, stirges, dragons, etc could all exist within his world (and consequently all their physiologies, so he was also a biology genius)?

I never said that I would consider him to be a good DM. After all, as you say, the numbers given on his various tables would imply a world that could not sustain itself.

 

[pemerton]

I feel that part of the tension also arises from matching the player's resource management and strategic thinking skills against the situation at hand. So that situation does need to be in some degree 'objectified'. That is it needs to be spelled out such that the players understand the task at hand and can make these strategic and logistical choices. Sometimes they may also choose to gamble, but it should be an interesting choice.

That all makes sense.