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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6521679" data-attributes="member: 42582">The flipside is that when multiple posters make the same point, it is easier to respond to them all at once. I also feel that it reinforces the public nature of the forum, which I regard as a valuable thing. Although it's a little bit like a conversation, I'm conscious that there are also others reading along without posting. So it's also a little bit like writing an essay.This I don't agree with. Retconning is always an option in serial fiction (which is what an RPG campaign resembles - story built on the back of already-"published" story). That doesn't mean that non-retconned material has no significance. Non-retconned is not the same as ambivalent or uncemented.Not "only". Simply "have the capacity to act."The structure of the game certainly generates the idea that divinity infuses many of their actions, though - for instance, even a paladin's at-will attacks are divine, not martial.But what I had in mind was skill challenges and p 42 - so if a cleric or paladin uses an encounter power to get +2 to a check in a skill challenge (as per DMG 2, building on remarks about power-use in skill challenges found in the PHB and DMG), that means that the divine is coming to his/her aid, although it will not be a standard use of that power.More generally, there is no presumption in 4e that skill-use is inherently "mundane". This is expressly called out in relation to the Arcana skill; it is an implication that follows from many published suggestions for skill challenges and the like in which a Religion check is made to generate some sort of spiritual or divinely empowered consequence (eg using Religion to gain beneficial omens in the DMG; using Religion as a countermeasure to possession by a demon in Demonomicon; etc), as well as the use of Religion for many ritual checks.Hence, narrating the end of an effect as a bestowal of divine beneficence doesn't contradict any mechanical presumption that only the standard uses of divine powers can count as manifestations of divine power.On the issue of "mechanical impact" of power source keywords, mechanics can cover a range of matters. As a general rule, the technical details of resolution (roll these dice, add this stat, etc) are not dependent on power source, although it is notable that martial powers get very little if any typed damage, that radiant damage is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) the province of divine powers, etc.But I think these keywords are very important to understanding what is happening in the fiction. When a cleric speaks a healing word, that is a divine power - the cleric revivifies by speaking some sort of rousing or restorative prayer. Contrast the warlord's inspiring word - although identical in its mechanical effects, this represents the rousing charisma of the battle captain. I think these differences in colour matter. They contribute to a picture of what is happening in the fiction, and underpin subsequent framing of action, narration of resolution, etc.An analogy could be drawn with Marvel Heroic RP: when Wolverine's player declares an attack using "I'm the best there is at what I do" for d8, and Captain America's player declares an attack using "Lead by Example", the mechanical resolution might be the same, but the action is meant to be narrated differently, and that different colour should infuse the narration of consequence, the framing of subsequent situations, etc.I think the "timelines" over which 4e unfolds are often longer than MHRP - in 4e you may not get the thematic and narrative feedback from colour right away if you are resolving a combat and mostly using out-of-the-book powers (when p 42 and skill challenge are underway, then the timelines become closer to those of MHRP). At least in my experience, that doesn't mean they're not there.For hit points you are correct. For saving throws, in the section on divine intervention he calls out "the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws" of higher level characters as "represent[ing] the aid supplied by supernatural forces" (pp 111-12).But in the section on saving throws (p 81), he says:A character under magical attack is in a stress situation, and his or her own will force reacts instinctively to protect the character by slightly altering the effects of the magical assault. This protection takes a slightly different form for each class of character. Magic-users understand spells, even on an unconscious level, and are able to slightly tamper with one so as to render it ineffective. Fighters withstand them through sheer defiance, while clerics create small islands of faith. Thieves find they are able to avoid a spell's full effects by quickness  . . .Given that a "small island of faith" is contrasted with sheer defiance, I have always assumed that the effect of that small island of faith is to bestow divine blessing. I have also always assumed that this is why clerics have the best saving throws vs poison and death magic (except for a small bracket of upper levels, where between 13th and 18th fighters are equal or better until clerics pass again at 19th): life is the special domain of their gods (given the default spell list and spell load-out of the AD&D cleric).For a player to narrate the end of an effect in these sorts of terms seems to me an extension or development of what Gygax says, from GM to player authorship. It doesn't seem a radical departure from it as far as the relationship between mechanics and establishing fictional content is concerned.(An aside: this is why I think one of 3E's biggest departures from AD&D is its changes to the saving throw rules, making them process-sim through-and-through. In this respect I think 5e is closer to 3E than to AD&D or 4e.)I think you may be underestimating how much 4e pushes towards the MHRP/Fate approach. For instance, one thing that codified "powers" do is reduce the incentive to pick up a free weapon simply for the buff; while the p 42 damage-by-level charts codify advantages in a way similar to those other systems.This is even moreso in skill challenges.Not to say that 4e is MHRP or Fate, but it's much closer to that than 3E or AD&D. I'm not sure about 5e, but I think it is probably closer to the earlier editions, lacking clearly codified level-appropriate damage, level-appropriate DCs, etc.There are a few things going on here.First, 4e doesn't have a kill-loot cycle built into it. It is the first edition of D&D to drop the connection, in its mechanics, between killing and treasure acquisition (though 3E Oriental Adventures also does this, so can claim to be first but isn't a core book). Treasure parcels - whose receipt is guaranteed simply by playing the game, and thereby accruing the XP that make up a level - can be derived from looting, from gifting, from finding, etc. There is no presumption one way or another, and nothing in the monster entries comparable to treasure type (in AD&D) or the Treasure entry and treasure tables in 3E.  Combined with inherent bonuses (in DMG 2) or treasure-as-item-upgrade (in Adventurer's Vault - this is how I have dropped the bulk of the treasure parcels in my game), there is no presumption in favour of treasure acquisition as looting.Secondly, 4e doesn't require GM fudging of results to produce "romantic fantasy" play. Outcomes aren't guaranteed -in that respect it is a trad RPG, in which the protagonist can fail. But the divorcing of the system from process sim means that the GM is almost always free to narrate TPK-style defeat as unconsciousness rather than death. An exception occurred in the one "TPK" in my game - a dying PC was caught in AoE "friendly fire" and dropped below negative bloodied, therefore being officially dead.But this leads to another point about fudging. When that PC died, it was easy to ask the player "Do you want to keep playing this guy, or bring in someone new?" The player wanted to continue with the same PC, so I narrated a resurrection scene which made sense in the fictional context (the Raven Queen sent her paladin back to deal with a wicked spirit that the goblin shaman had bound as a wraith) and simply deducted the cost of a Raise Dead ritual from the next treasure parcel. In other words, there is a very straightforward system economy against which to judge the extent and cost of such GM decisions. (I think this also counts as an example of some sort of player authorship, though not one that involved character immersion.)4e is trad in its allocation to the GM of responsibility for preparing adversaries. (Though see some of my comments on GMing techniques below - the framework of its core cosmology, based around mythologically-grounded conflicts between the powers rather than the more traditional allocation of portfolios and alignments, opens up a bigger space for player signalling than is traditional - with AD&D Oriental Adventures being another early exception in my view.) But not so trad as to be radically different from Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, Marvel Heroic RP, and I imagine a fair bit of Fate play.To set up a slightly odd counterfactual - if a Martian RPGer came down to earth and read the 4e rulebooks (but with the DMG chapters on dungeon dressing taken out), and (being a Martian) knew nothing of the history of the game or its prior editions, I don't think s/he would extract the ethos you describe. (Whereas in the Gygax version I believe it is solidly inscribed.) The chapters in the DMG that I'm hiding from the Martian serve a legacy function, but nothing more than that (and in fact I agree with [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] that it takes skill to do dungeoncrawling well in 4e - some posters on these boards have mastered that art).So I think 4e has a purely legacy connection to the "ethos of D&D" that you describe. That may well be so, though it strikes me as such an obvious solution to the problem of the GM using mechanical alignment to hose players of clerics and paladins - with immersion-busting consequences on the side - that I'd be shocked if mine is the only group to have taken the game in this sort of direction.In your original quote, what struck me was less the "YMMV" and more the contrast between immersion in character and immersion in story. Your repost has made the "YMMV" loom larger, but I'm still not sure what its scope is: are you saying that mileages may vary in respect of the impact on immersion of heavy mechanics, or also in respect of the "bonk" effect of authorship?In the example I gave, the player was not immersed in story - as one might be when watching a film. He was immersed in character - his character, the devout and unyielding paladin of the Raven Queen. It is that immersion which led him to utter his retort (and thereby engage in a piece of player authorship) without skipping a beat at the table. There was no "bonk" effect - quite the opposite; and had I said to him "Of course, you might think that the Raven Queen turned you back from a frog, but only the GM knows for sure" I would have completely broken his immersion in his character, by generating doubt or a crisis of faith where, from his perspective, the fiction presented no grounds for such emotions. The "bonk" would have resulted from questioning his authorship.To the extent that this falls under your "YMMV" then there may be no point of contention between us - I hope you'll expand on this! But the "immersion in character"/"immersion in story" contrast struck me (perhaps wrongly) as another device for trying to wedge the 4e players/story gamers/what have you away from those who are the truly character-immersed roleplayers. If this rhetorical effect was not what you intended, then I'm sorry that I read you wrongly.5e I don't have a proper handle on in this respect, although with its mechanically simple monsters and strong background + personality system couldn't it be approached "no myth" (well, quasi-no-myth) after settling on a few core conceits with the group? (I'm not sure where you see Burning Wheel or Fate as falling on the no-myth spectrum, but I think of them as considerably closer to no myth than trad dungeon-crawling D&D, and couldn't 5e be played in a similar way?)In this case I was the DM. The PCs were fighting the Hexing cultists because they were Far Realm-crazed allies of the PCs' nemesis, an agent of Vecna trying to recover the Raven Queen's name. The next session was a social only session dominated by dinner with the Baron, which led to the party's fighter and wizard-invoker (as he then was, before being reborn as an invoker-wizard) calling out that nemesis (who was also the adviser to the Baron), leading to combat with the nemesis, which was then followed by an assault on the Baron by a catoblepas, plus cultists of Orcus taking advantage of the catoblepas-induced chaos). Somewhere during all this, but I can't remember exactly when or how, the paladin had received a sign that the catoblepas was on its way (the MM3 catoblepas write-up links them tightly to knights of the Raven Queen, and this paladin has Questing Knight as his paragon path).In terms of GMing techniques, I would have had potential/likely opponents statted out in advance, because it speeds things up (especially if they are custom). On this occasion I also had maps drawn of the Far Realm cultists house and the Baron's mansion, both adapted from the 3E module Speaker in Dreams. How and if/when things get dropped into play depends on what is happening in the game. As best I recall I hadn't been expecting the Baron's dinner to turn into a fight against the advisor; but I do remember I had been anticipating for some time that the PCs might attack him, because I remember statting him up, and then re-statting him with a stepped up level at least once because he was still on the scene, and needed to be levelled up to remain a mechanically relevant opponent.So I don't think there was any "diversion": the focus of play was on dealing with the baron, and his advisor, and other enemies of the Raven Queen. And it remained so. (For completeness: there was some other connected stuff involving dwarves, and the fate of civilisation against hobgoblin attacks under the Baron's leadership, which spoke more to the conerns of some of the less Raven Queen-focused players.)Session Zero? At first I assumed a d20 variant, but a quick Google suggests that this is analogous to the character-and-campaign building step in Fate or Burning Wheel. Is that right?My group tends to be fairly informal about these things - because we are very stable and default to extended campaigns, we can afford to use the first few sessions of actual play to find out what makes the characters tick, how they fit together and how their destinies might be connected, etc. The players also tend to look to me (as GM) to somehow twist and weave their various goals and loyalties and backgrounds together - they will do some of this themselves, but not to the sort of extent that Fate does by default.When we started our 4e game, I told every player that each PC had to have one loyalty in his/her background, and a reason to be ready to fight goblins. Otherwise anything from core 4e was available. At the start of the game I therefore knew that I had three PCs who worshipped the Raven Queen (a popular loyalty), and four PCs who really wanted revenge against goblins (and five PCs altogether - two PCs overlapped the two categories, and one of the PCs had only fairly weak reasons to be ready to fight goblins). So it was only natural that the initial antagonist (Golthar from the module B11 Night's Dark Terror merged with Paldemar from H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth) should be sending goblins to raid the foresters so that they might find a lost tapestry that contained a secret for stealing power for Vecna, while he himself tried to learn the secret of the Raven Queen's name so that he could trade it to Orcus in return for the control over dead spirits, and also to help Orcus kill the Raven Queen.From the perspective of player authorship, it was the players who made Orcus and Vecna so central (by choosing Raven Queen devotees - and subsequent choices of religious orientation have made other gods and primordials come to the fore as allies or antagonists). Goblins as opposition was stipulated by me as GM (because I had a module - B11 - that has as an early big scene a goblin assault on a homestead, complete with a grid map, not to mention a race against time to beat the goblins to the homestead, which was our first skill challenge). And I wrote in the nemesis, Golthar/Paldemar.In terms of how close this is to the norms of D&D play - I think it's pretty far from dungeon-of-the-week, or from adventure path, play. It's not full-fledged No Myth. The approach is something I worked out myself GMing Oriental Adventures around 1986-87. The GMing manuals that I find most helpful, in the sense of giving me advice that I feel is relevant to my game and helps me improve it, are Luke Crane's Adventure Burner and some of Robin Laws HeroWars/Quest books, and also Maelstrom Storytelling. I learned of the latter from Ron Edwards, and I find some of his posts, and also Paul Czege, pretty helpful too.The GMing advice that I think is least helpful to me is the sort found in the Wilderness Survival Guide, and Rolemaster's Campaign Law and (later) GM Law, which emphasises starting with a map, then adding history and gods, etc, etc - but says very little about framing and managing situations, following the hooks and leads that the players throw up, etc. Back in my early days of GMing I tried a bit of this sort of stuff, but didn't find it very effective.The way I would summarise my approach is: if the goal of the adventure is a McGuffin in the literal sense - that is, the bulk of the adventure would be the same regardless of goal (rescue the princess, recover the artefact, etc), and regardless of the PCs participating in it - then it's not for me as player or GM. I think this preference is consistent with expectations of player authorship of certain key background details that are core to that player's PC. I think it deviates from ENworld norms, and so probably from more general D&D norms (at least non-4e D&D norms). But there are enough posters on these boards who seem to approach the game in similar ways that I don't think it's some sort of crazy minority.You did a good job! (I also agree that AEDU is not an aspect of 4e that marks any radical departure from the past.)Probably our main point of disagreement (or perhaps difference in experience, and perceptions/conceptualisations built out of that experience), is that I think that 4e is a relatively natural outgrowth of non-Gygaxian AD&D (ie trying to use AD&D to play Dragonlance and the like) plus 3E's basic mechanical rationalisations of the AD&D system, together with 3E's frank embrace of heavy over light system.What it drops from 3E is the veering towards process-sim. What it drops from non-Gygaxian AD&D is the baroque subystems, and the reliance upon the GM to inject any sense of theme or narrative direction.As to whether I'm an outlier in viewing 4e this way, or just lucky that it doesn't get in my way: when I read Chris Perkins columns on the WotC site I don't see anything that strikes me as foreign or deviant from my approach. He seems to have richly developed PCs, with goals that drive the campaign (but still relying on the GM to inject adversity), and with the mechanics feeding into that (eg the fact that one of the PCs was a Prince of Hell made a difference to the play of the game).Perhaps controversially, and responding to this and an earlier post of yours, I don't think trad dungeon-crawling loot-and-kill D&D is very Conan-esque either. Conan quite often gets no treasure (eg The Phoenix on the Sword) or loses the treasure (eg Tower of the Elephant, and the one set in pseudo-Africa where he sacrifices the jewels of Gwahlur for the girl). And he is not amoral, either. While I think there are significant obstacles to playing OGL Conan for a Conan-esque result (all its d20isms), and I think there are issues with GM-adjudicated alignments/codes, I think it was right in putting forward the idea of the Barbarian's Code of Honour.The most Conan-esque game I feel I've ever run was a relatively recent Burning Wheel session. (Write-up <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?736425-Burning-Wheel-First-Burning-Wheel-session" target="_blank">here</a>.) I'm pretty confident I couldn't have done that in AD&D, and it would have been hard in Rolemaster also (RM lacks "say yes" rules, and they can't easily be grafted on without pushing hard against the general ethos of the system).</blockquote>

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