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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3807694" data-attributes="member: 4937">I am saying that that is a bad thing and not a worthy design goal.  The reason it is a bad design goal is that it is unattainable.  The only way to obtain it is do away with a rules system completely, but even extemporaneous story telling in rounds is going to produce something noticibly different than what is produced by a single all powerful novelist and it will be experienced in a different way by its participants.The art being created in an RPG is more different from movies and novels, than movies and novels are for each other.  In movies and novels, the protagonist essentially has zero possibility of failure.  No matter how bad the odds are, the protagonist is always going to win through because the protagonist can always be made to roll 20 20's in a row or whatever he needs to do the crazily impossible thing that turns around the impossible situation.  What people who are desparately trying to emulate novels want is really to have zero possibility of failure without knowing that they have zero possibility of failure, and in the real game world there are hard limits to how much of that sort of illusionism you can actually have.  What is really trying to be achieved her is full control over the story while maintaining the illusion that you don't have full control over the story.  The Saga system explicitly is trying to do this:"At this point, you might be wondering why these changes were made. The simple answer is this: Anyone can do anything in Star Wars if the scene calls for it." - WotC PreviewsBut of course, if this is a game then most certainly the characters can't do anything because the scene doesn't actually call for anything.  Outcomes are never predetermined, and that engineering principle I mentioned earlier is going to force any system with continued skill checks toward a binary, 'Yes.' or 'No.' situation.That part of the paragraph at least I agree with.  The only thing that is really changing is the distance across the gap.PS: One last thing.  Earlier there was a big stink about how much it sucked in 3e that a Wizard had to pick up a crossbow (at least in the early levels) and use one.  The general feeling of the pro-4e crowd was that characters should never have to depart from thier 'thing', whatever that thing was, because for whatever reason that was bad.  If you were a Wizard they argued, then you should always be using your magic.  In yet another case of not clearly knowing what you want, now we are to believe that every class ought to be able to overcome problems by not doing thier thing.  Ok, so you are less effective, but so was the crossbow.  Maybe you can conjure up some flavor and pretend this is an at will spell ability enhancing your Wizard's skills, but don't pretend that you are doing niche protection if you do so.  If WotC had flavored this as 'Wizards can now do at will skill enhancing spells', there would be howls of protest.</blockquote>

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