Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4296907" data-attributes="member: 47776">Videogamey is, to me, mechanics that exist without regard for how the world has been previously described as working, for the obvious purpose of bringing about a (specific) fun game experience.Two basic examples are Terror-Wall of Stone and NPC invulerability.  In the first example, an effect is used on a creature that it should logically bounce off of.  The deliberate decision to not adjudicate away these point-specific invulnerabilities (or to generate a system that handles them) smacks very much of a video-game, in which not every combinatoric combination of effects could be personally vetted ahead of time for reasonability.  An example of 4E being video-gamey in this way is warforged's lack of immunity to inhaled poisons, despite their lack of requirement to breathe.  In a videogame, it could be ignored that a warforged took damage walking through a room full of poison gas; in a tabletop RPG, players are much more likely to ask about simply tying a hood over their character's heads and taking other measures that should stop the poison.Another example of video-game-osity is where the mechanics fail to provide rules for something because said actions are not the intended results.  Many RPGs do not have combat statistics for the nameless NPCs and quest-givers in towns; it is not expected for characters to attempt to murder Barak Breaktooth instead of fetching him his five lion pelts, so Barak is unfightable.  In 4E, we have supremely abbreviated statistics for any NPCs not intended to be combat encounters for the PCs, and very little guidelines for figuring out what those statistics are meant to represent in-world.One extremely non-videogamey aspect of 4E is the ability to dynamically generate skill challenges, to represent a cunning and difficult plan on the part of the PCs to bypass what would otherwise be a difficult or non-surmoutable obstacle.  Clever PCs might hear an incidental war cry from the orc scouts, use their Religion skill to realize that the orcs have turned to a debased form of Tiamat-worship, pull out the set of religious relics they previously looted from kobold's caverns, stroll into the camp in full Tiamat-garb, slay the orc's shaman, and use their legendary force of personality to demand that the orcs now worship the PCs.  4E falls down on its lack of videogamey potential, however, when you see the amount of work you need to do to get such a simple concept as "Previous enemies become allies." to mesh with the expected encounter system.</blockquote>

Verification