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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6936066" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is why I pointed to 1e's very strong and obvious links to war gaming.   Those have never completely went away, but I have seen BECMI and 2e in particular largely played in a theater of the mind style, with largely subjective positioning (as a practical matter, often 'in melee' and 'not in melee') and little attention paid to tactics.3e in particular tried to give DMs a unified approach to adjudicating non-combat situations, effectively turning a bunch of ad hoc rulings and house rules that 1e and 2e had accumulated over the years (even in published works) into a single simpler 'skills' system, with the idea of a target difficulty and so forth.   The first paragraph is contradicted by the second.  While 1e had no unified approach to exploration and relied heavily on a metagame negotiation to discover and overcome features of the environment that has been disparagingly called 'pixel bitching', the game still assumed on a meta-level that exploration between and within rooms was still a big part of the game.  In fact, the example of play in the 1e DMG spends far more time on the players proposing to explore the environment and learn about it than it does on combat.  It actually cuts from the example of play when the large combat occurs, as if how to play a combat would be obvious from the rules.  4e on the other hand assumes that this exploratory game - this simulation of the whole world if you will - won't be a big part of play, and instead far and away the dominate focus of play will be on producing exciting and yes cinematic combat scenes.  Almost the whole game is assumed to occur within the framework of combat, so that for example, traps are expected to be used primarily as terrain and complications within the framework of combat, and not so much as complications of the exploratory portion of the game.Probably the most definitive part of this is that characters were given powers that almost exclusively were meant to be used in combat.  So while a 1e thief's powers are mostly useful in the exploratory phase of the game, the 4e rogue is almost exclusively about doing cool things in combat.  The game is paced specifically around 'encounters', which are 'combat encounters', and for which you have 'encounter powers', which are actually 'combat encounter powers'.   No one really has daily powers like, "Find secret door." or "Initiate a Parlay" or "Decipher a clue." and the general design is that problems are combats which will be overcome by timely application of one of your listed powers.   This is a massively different assumption than exists in 1e through 3e.  The idea of the open ended negotiation of the scene implicit in 1e is almost completely gone.  You could port it back in of course, and some did, but the game does not expect you to and certainly does not guide a new player to do so.</blockquote>

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