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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6567082" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I'll parry with nerdface! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/glasses.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt="B-)" title="Glasses    B-)" data-shortname="B-)" />I bit above I responded to S'mon about en(dis)able versus en(dis)courage.  I think that is pretty much where the evaluation for rulesets should be.  I think 4e did a whole lot of things that frustrates the hell out of hardcore simulationists and/or illusionism GMs.  I think you can look to those things as component parts that discourage process simulation and, while not totally disabling, severely undermining an illusionism GM's latitude.  Taken as a whole, I understand why hardcore process sim folks and illusionist GMs went so balls-out in the edition wars.For instance, James Wyatt has designer notes right up front talking about a GM's role in the game.  He talks about how he lets his players handle the rules-related affairs (eg confirming DCs, gaining stealth requirements, etc) of the game and he frames the fiction, pushes the conflict-buttons, and plays the monsters/adversary.  Off-loading rules related stuff on players (from rules handling, to quest creation, to keeping track of rewards/milestones - etc, magic item handling, etc), reducing total GM overhead, is a big part of 4e as a whole and it is pretty roundly cited for it (both by the designers in the books, by its proponents, and certainly by its detractors!).  That approach by itself is very, very adversarial to illusionism.Further, the invocation of transparency (Mearls even has an article in DMG2 regarding skill challenges...which is pretty wishy washy but certainly highlights the merits of letting players see under the hood with free access to the metagame) and the approach in the books (Quests...the Rewards Frequency table...Rest and Recovery...Magic Items all being in the PHB) is pretty significantly adversarial to illusionism.  (I'm just going to call it ) Laws' DMG2 really invokes letting players see under the hood, passing authority over to them (letting them frame some of their own conflicts and then playing the adversarial components...akin to the Dog's initial trials in DitV), and offloading overhead to them.  The run-up and early-on designer notes articles really invoked GM transparency as a virtue and several Dungeon articles did the same.I guess I'll just say that GMs can certainly try to make the veil between the machinery of the game and the players as opaque as possible in 4e...but I think the system will fight them very hard...to the point that they will probably give up (and many did!).  And I guess I'll also just say that transparency and off-loading overhead onto the players is definitely a thing that doesn't have to happen, but 4e encourages/enables it by making it easy and the designers certainly at least tacitly invokes it as a virtue.  I think you see the full-fledged incarnation of it (outright championing transparency and admonishing opacity) in 13th Age by Heinsoo (4e is his baby) and Tweet.  I think that is also telling.Alright, going to be a busy day but I'm going to attempt to break down an exploration encounter in 4e and a social encounter in DW and illustrate why the games would render illusionism untenable.  I will likely have to do one at a time.</blockquote>

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