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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6094897" data-attributes="member: 42582">And as we've discussed before, I think that's completely and utterly reasonable. 4e's a heavy system, and it relies upon you being able to look at a piece of action economy (say, Calastryx growing an extra head when bloodied) and have that speak to you in a way that generates an emotinal response.I personally think it's well suited for a crossover of light narrativism and traditional heavy mechanics lovers - based mostly on conjecture, I would put it in the same sort of space as Burning Wheel or The Riddle of Steel in this respect.A game like MHRP is so obviously lighter - when I wrote up my own rules summary trying to teach myself the system I got it onto 2 A4 sheets - I think there's almost no comparison. If the mechanical bits of 4e don't speak story to you, I think there's no way you'll get story out of it, because of its mechanical weight.That's why I was so surprised and excited when it was released - it's the game for a Rolemaster-lover who finds The Forge a great RPG advice site - and I didn't think the market for that sort of thing was as big as D&D's market. And maybe it wasn't.That may be right. Given they're trying to go lighter, I think it's a pity they aren't going more of the MHRP-ish route: as well as backgrounds as free descriptors you could loosen up spells a whole lot, and really give the idea of "rulings rather than rules" the space to flourish. I find the mix of lightness in places like skills with traditional AD&D-ish exhaustive detail on spells a bit inconsistent - to me, they really seem to pull in different directions.That all sounds very plausible to me. As I've already indicated on some other threads, my feeling is that when you go this way it might just turn out to be impossible to recapture that "table presence" via the modularity route. Particularly when a key part of the table presence is such a distinctive approach (by D&D standards) to metagamemechanics and GM force, and the game seems to have at its core an aversion to metagame mechanics and a heavy reliance on GM force.</blockquote>

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