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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6654363" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to convey upthread (post 841). Progression in 4e is not about bigger bonuses, but about a combination of mechanical minutiae (the balrog's aura, etc) and the fiction that accompanies and is generated by that.I think the game's mechanics make a huge difference.I mentioned upthread that every Rolemaster table has a tale of how a double-open-ended roll saved the party's bacon. One that I remember is when the PCs were all down but for one, the martial artist, who was at huge penalties (-70-ish?) inside a fire storm confronting the largely uninjured bad guy. The martial artist's initiative comes up, the player rolls, double-open-ended and so overcomes his penalties and hits the bad guy for an 'E' crit, and then rolls 80+ on the crit: the bad guy is dead, and the PCs saved!This is a fiction that can't be achieved in any version of D&D, because they don't have the death spiral penalties, nor the crit-rather-than-hit-point mechanics, to make it possible. Part of the appeal of Rolemaster (and similar games - Burning Wheel has some commonalities here, and HARP is a deliberate RM derivative) is that this sort of thing is possible.The fiction of 4e combat, and especially paragon an epic combat, is something that I think is intimately tied to its mechanics, and hard to emulate in other systems. Especially the sense of digging deep, deep and drawing on everything you've got. The way player resources are allocated and their use rationed is a huge part of this, for instance.Playing AD&D, for instance, when the fighter player rolls a 19 and hits and kills the Type VI demon the GM can narrate that the fighter drew deep on his/her reserves and won: but the player won't have actually lived that experience. Whereas a 4e player who is invested in the resource management elements of the game will have.So I can see where AbdulAlhazred is coming from. This also, to me at least, seems to fit with what [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] has posted upthread about the affinity between 5e and classic adventures like Hommlet, Barrier Peaks, etc, which I feel don't push the fiction in the sort of way that paragon and epic 4e does.I have some trouble following this.I mean, if you strip all the fiction off the mechanics, yes, they are nothing more than minutiae. But that seems equally true of 5e. I mean, how is "Roll with your +3 bonus; you need a total of 12 to succeed" turning into "Roll with your +9 bonus; you need a total of 12 to succeed" some dramatic experience, if no fiction is attached?But when you attach the fiction, and hence give the mechanical events some sort of emotional weight in the context of the game, then the extra complexity of 4e isn't meaningless - the wizard is flying through the air to escape the fire aura of a balrog! As opposed to, at low levels, falling back a few feet to escape the scimitar of an orc.As for the unexpected - a roll of 100 on d% is (relatively) unexpected. That's the lottery that RM's open-ended mechanics trade on. But there are other sorts of things that can be unexpected to, like the mechanical synergies that result from deploying complex mechanical resources, and the fiction that accompanies them.4e is not very lottery-focused, but that doesn't mean that unexpectedness is not an important part of the game!It's a tautology that, if I roll a d20 and add +3 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed only 20% of the time, and that if I roll a d20 and add +17 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed 90% of the time. That mathematical truth is not, on its own, awesome (in my view). It is only the connection of the maths to some sort of fiction that makes it awesome in the RPGing context.At around 3rd level, the PCs in my game fought hobgoblins one-on-one. Ten levels later, they fought hobgoblins in phalanxes (statted as huge and gargantuan swarms). That's also mechanics connected to fiction.I personally feel it's illustrative of the point about expanding scope of fiction that AdbulAlhazred pointed to. I think that's more of an innate tendency in 4e than 5e.I enjoy GMing, but don't think my imagination trumps that of the players. For me, part of the fun of GMing is finding out how the players riff off the fictional and mechanical situations that I frame their PCs into.A fairly recent example was when <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?440504-The-Abyss-sealed-the-drow-freed-the-campaign-reaches-its-climax" target="_blank">the PCs exploited the principle of thermodynamics to seal off the Abyss</a>.I haven't read many posts that give me a sense of how that sort of thing would work in 5e. In 4e, it relies on a mixture of the DC-setting rules, the relatively abstract architecture of the power mechanics and their somewhat loose fit with the fiction, and the thematic flavour/colour that comes from PC build choices (especially paragon paths and epic destinies).5e has different DC rules (as we've been discussing), its spells are a bit more traditional (tight packages of fiction and mechanics) and it has, perhaps, a bit less theme/colour in its approach to PC build (most of that is front-loaded via backgrounds).Any thoughts would be welcome!</blockquote>

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