NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5820194" data-attributes="member: 42582">Don't hold back!I would agree that I'm not responsible for the lack of self-knowledge of one of your players whom I assume I have never met or otherwise interacted with.I think it's the single most prominent approach on these boards. I don't have a view on whether it's the most popular mode of play more generally, or even the most popular on these boards. I assume that Encounters and Lair Assault are pretty popular, or why would WotC run them? And they're not very Gygaxian.Who's stigmatising gamism? I didn't say anything about gamism in this thread. In the recent long GNS thread on General I defended the centrality of gamism to D&D against the arguments of the OP that gamism is a deviant or secondary form of RPGing.Part of the complaint about 3E fighters having no social skills is driven by gamist concerns. There is an arena of challenge in which fighters are hosed not through bad play, or even bad PC building, but by unfair limitations in the PC build mechanics themselves.If you're objecting to the idea that some PCs might be good at wooing maidens, others at scaring them, I think this is analogous - in the social domain - to some PCs being good in melee, others in archery. The latter has, for years, been creating more complex and dynamic game play as the players have to develop a plan of action that brings their divergent capacities to bear while not getting beaten by their enemies. Whereas it is notorious that D&D social interaction - especially in its 3E form - is plagued by the problem of everyone deferring to the "face" PC. One way to get rid of this problem is to make everyone be able to be "the face". Which is then seen to threaten homogeneity. Which can, in turn, be avoided if different PCs have different "faces" - eg some nice, others scary. Which also then opens up a scope for interesting social play somewhat on a par with the existing interesting tactical dynamics of combat.I'm sure there are other ways to design a gamist system around the three pillars, but the above strikes me as one obvious approach.I'm confused. The only thing that I've said there is a lack of support for is how to run skill challenges. And I think that's a legitimate complaint, given that they are meant to be core to action resolution in 4e. As a mechanic, they're obviously derived from other "extended contest/scene resolution" mechanics in games like HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling. In fact, the 4e DMG 2 has Robin Laws regurgitate a whole lot of stuff from HeroQuest revised, but unfortunately, it is not adjusted to fit the 4e approaches to encounter design and action resolution (which are different from HeroQuest in some important ways) and is therefore close to useless for the 4e GM.There are other obvious points at which 4e draws on other contemporary games for ideas and advice. Save My Game, for example, in a column last year advised using "Let It Ride" in 4e.One thing that's interesting, though, is that many of these games don't emphasise party play in the same way as D&D does, and therefore don't face quite the same issues in respect of "3 pillars" PC-building. They put the pressure elsewhere, like how to have the stories of the separate PCs connect, and how to make action resolution matter at the group level in the metagame, even if it's separated in the gameworld.I'm not even arguing for any form of D&D in this thread. I'm just suggesting various ways how 3 pillars design might be done.</blockquote>

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