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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6007464" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sure. Or, if I were to display some more of my own familiarity and prejudices, Vincent Baker, Paul Czege or Luke Crane.More good designers there.My real goal - which I hope was clear - was not to particularly laud Robin Laws, but rather to point out that there are RPGs designed by leading contemporary designers which adopt the approach of relativising DCs/target numbers/antagonists' bonuses to the numbers on the players' PC sheets; and which then expect the GM to narrate the situation in line with the allocated numbers, so as to preserve immersion, verismilitude, genre expectations, the integrity of the fiction, etc.That's not the only tenable approach for a contemporary game - Burning Wheel, for example, uses "objective" DCs. But it's just absurd to claim that it is inimical to roleplaying per se.I don't doubt that you are truly reporting your own experiences.I also agree that there can be more elegant ways to handle "flat maths" than the 4e approach - although I think it does a reasonable job of reconciling flat maths with the traditional D&D expectation of scaling attack bonuses, bonus weapons etc.But this doesn't show (i) that 4e emphasises the maths rather than the fiction, nor (ii) that it is not, or tends not to be played as, an RPG.In my own experience, the relatively flat maths of 4e (relatively flat because the scaling is rlatively constant throughout the system) tends to make the fiction more important, not less, because what is significant about (for example) Orcus is not that he's impossible to hit - by the time the PCs meet Orcus, the scaling makes hitting Orcus perfectly viable - but that he's Orcus!</blockquote>

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