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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5783460" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks.If I had a dollar for every time someone has said that to me . . .Anyway, you're almost certainly right.That makes sense to me.In my 4e game I'm the GM. I enjoy combats. I don't particularly care whether they're tactical or not - I GMed a Rolemaster game with the same (or at least an overlapping) group for over 15 years, and RM is much more AD&D-ish in its approach to movement and positioning.But, maybe a bit like your storyteller GM, I find that 4e supports me in a lot of ways. Certainly in encounter design. Also in pacing - I find that 4e combat naturally have a 3 act structure: first act, the combat begins; second act, the monsters seem to be gaining the advantage as their stronger initial attacks and higher hit points dominate the situation; third act, the PCs rebound and win as they draw on their deeper resources (surges, APs, dailies, etc) and just refuse to be defeated. This gives me the scope to hang quite a bit of the story stuff I want off the combat mechanics.And the other thing that 4e does - and this has come up on the PC/NPC statting thread - is get out of my way in certain key respects. For example, it doesn't make me spend a lot of effort on timekeeping (there aren't 10 min/level, or 1 hr/level, spell durations, for instance). Which greatly facilitates crisp scene framing and scene resolution. To allude to the famous Wyatt passage in the DMG, while the game permits me to run an encounter with the guards at the gate, it is equally viable to skip over such things without doing any damage to the action resolution mechanics.My worry - which is based in what strikes me as the general tenor of Monte Cook's L&L threads - is that the "tactics" version of D&Dnext will keep the "elegant balance" of 4e, but drop some of the other non-simulationist features (like healing surges, for example) that make it work for a nicely-pased, situation/scene-framing type game. That is, that some of the features that are good for gamist play will remain, but some of the features of 4e that support narrativism as well as gamism will be lost.</blockquote>

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