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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5467668" data-attributes="member: 42582">Who is making that claim?It's not in dispute that 4e is a non-simulationist game, and is therefore different from simulationist games.Your game is radically different from mine. But in my view you are not accurately capturing the nature of the difference.You'll have to tell me more about what counts as a solution being decided by anthying not on a character sheet. Do you mean White Plume Mountain, and removing the doors to surf down the frictionless corridor? But even this can be affected by character sheets, it they tell us which PC is a better carpenter.So I'm not really following here. Give me an example of what you mean be a situation where it would be irrelevant that two players have different information on their character sheets.  This isn't helping me. If you're talking about removing doors, higher STR will help. If you're talking about surfing down the corridor, higher DEX will help. What have you got in mind that makes the character sheet irrelevant? Hussar answered this. I'll add - it's somewhat like random encounters - its using the game rules to inject complications into the situation (I know that random encounters can do other stuff as well, like act as a contraint on the PCs' use of time - but introducing complication is one of the things they do).At this level of generality, random encounter checks are "mechanics before reality", because they dictate a change in the situation which results from a dice roll and not the internal logic of the narrative.If your point is that a good GM will sometimes disregard a random monster check, then I reply that (i) a good GM will use similar discretion in adjudicating a skill challenge (as discussed, for example, in DMG2) and (ii) there are issues about good GMs disregarding or fudging die rolls. Too much generous discretion can undermine the point of random encounters. It can likewise undermine the point of a skill challenge.OK. I don't regard this as equivalent to "the mechanics determine the narrative". The difference between "setting parameters to be complied with" and "determining" is important in a lot of contexts. I think this is one of them.But only because the random encounter mechanics told you so.And are you suggesting that a skill challenge never arises because of an unexpected narrative twist? I only had to resolve a bear-taming skill challenge because the players decided they didn't want to kill the bear - something I hadn't expected.At this level of generalisation, I don't see how this isn't happening all the time in a typical RPG.The dragon breathes on the fighter chained to a rock. It looks like the fighter is doomed. But the player successfully rolls the save, and the GM has to narrate how the fighter found a crack in the rock and successfully tucked in behind it. (The example is from the 1st ed DMG.)Agreed. As far as I can tell, here is the difference: in the ideal world of the "fiction first" side, those random rolls wouldn't be required. As BryonD put it, they are simply a way of handling an unexpected twist. They are a subsitute for prep, which is the ideal.The "mechanics first" side, as it is being labelled, wants the random rolls. Having noticed that some of the best RPGing happens when complications were unexpectedly injected into the situation, we actively embrace mechanics that are designed to produce this sort of result.This goes back to my posts on the "Not as popular as it could have been" thread - it's part of the logic of 4e not to have a fully fleshed-out setting, because 4e is aimed at a type of play where developing and expanding on situations in the real time of play is a virtue, not a mere necessity arising from the players doing something unexpected.</blockquote>

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