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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6582434" data-attributes="member: 82106">Its hard for me to answer since I don't actually know how SW's mechanics differ from 4e's. 4e is a pretty straightforward system, mechanically, with quite clean core mechanics that depend heavily on hooking into keywords to achieve coordination with narrative and variations in mechanics. SCs build on that system, as does combat, to produce easily explicated and relatively transparent mechanical resolution and mapping to narrative elements. The reverse element, mapping from narrative to mechanics is left largely up to the DM and players, but keywords are huge here. For example its quite easy to decide that 'fire' has certain interactions with water, flammable materials, etc. and at that end of things 4e doesn't require any specialized terminology, you can simply work with normal ordinary definitions of words. Exactly how those interactions are mechanically manifested (IE what happens when you fireball under water) is open. While this could be an entry point for DM force and Illusionist play it is heavily mitigated by the fact that everyone can agree on what's going on, you're underwater, and you're casting a fireball, and nobody will be able to argue about similar situations when they come up in the future. If the DM argues that the power fails, then when an NPC starts casting underwater fireballs any DM bad faith is going to be right there in player's faces. Frankly I think no system can do much better than this anyway, as there are virtually infinite possible interactions like this, you can't provide a full accounting, nor are we all likely to entirely agree on how each one should work (IE many people are fine with underwater fireballs, its magic after all).The way the skill system is so general and focuses on both ends and general concerns vs any sort of process-sim type of focus is exceedingly valuable as well. Its rare to be unclear as to which skill applies to something, or find that the choice seems awkward. Beyond that 4e's 'say yes' is a pretty good deal. The DM is being discouraged from being a roadblock and encouraged to use the 'rule of cool'. It could go further, there's no explicit advice to 'fail forward' but you also do have APs and HS which are at least partly a meta-game resource that can be further leveraged. Finally, the system is just both very fine-grained in terms of providing a huge array of options that let you do most anything with a character, AND very loose and general in terms of how they work fictionally, which means that in practice you can get what you want out of your character. There's not a lot of "oh, gosh its really hard to map this narrative into the character sheet" unless you're really unusually pedantic about reflavoring things or bending the character build rules in small ways when it suites the story. My example of the 'Axe Mage' works here. Just throw out the "you have to use a sword if you're a swordmage" restriction for that character. Its not a hard thing to do and a DM should be able to gauge the mechanical repercussions of such a thing without much trouble. Its remotely possible some feat can combine with that in some odd way, but maybe that's cool too, unless your player is a complete tool.</blockquote>

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