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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6667583" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not really sure what the criteria are for something being a "story game" - it's a term I'm rather wary of.I think that D&D can be used for what I would call narrativist or story now play. In AD&D, this requires pushing against some elements of the system - for instance, AD&D's combat mechanics don't naturally generate story in the moment of play, and nor do its encumbrance rules. I don't think it's an accident that it was with Oriental Adventures that I stumbled into story-now-style play - OA combat has more story in the moment (ki powers, martial arts manoeuvres, etc, which let the players make choices that reflect their view of the fictional weight of the situation), and more support (via the GM-side story elements it provides, as well as the player-side background generation) for non-dungeon-crawling adventures.The "points" you refer to are, in 4e, primarily powers (combat and non-combat). The players get to decide when to spend them, and thereby to decide how much importance they want to place on some particular bit of fiction. And 4e has probably the least amount of non-story record-keeping of any version of D&D (very low importance given to encumbrance, healing across scenes, etc). Of course if you don't enjoy combat as a site of story most of 4e's mechanics will be wasted on you, but I think that's orthogonal.As well as spending points, the other way that players "impact the fiction" in a story-now sort of game is via action declaration. AD&D is very inflexible in its action declaration rules (not much outside combat and dungeon exploration) - or, looked at in another way, any action declaration outside a rather narrow range immediately invokes GM fiat. 4e is, in my view, much stronger in this respect - its mechanics support quite a wide range of action declarations (the flexibility of "subjective DCs" and their relationship to the fiction has been discussed extensively upthread), and the GM has the tools to resolve them, and the system doesn't have things like encumbrance, wandering monster rules etc that tend to undermine scene-focused resolution in favour of continuous time world exploration.That's not to say that 4e will support any story/genre that a group wants. Even within my rather narrow band of taste for fantasy RPGing, my Burning Wheel game is pretty different from my 4e one. But both rely primarily on GM-side scene-framing plus player-side freedom of action declaration to make things hum along.Agreed. Encumbrance, and tracking of natural healing, often aren't complex but are tedious.That said, I don't agree that 3E was less complex than AD&D. Its notionally uniform resolution mechanic involves dozens of modifiers, DCs, etc. Whether or not its more tedious (I don't have enough experience to judge) I think it's more complex. To elaborate just a bit: my mental arithmetic is very strong and I don't mind keeping track of running totals of modifiers; but knowing the triggering conditions for modifiers falls on your complexity side rather than your tedium side, and 3E and 4e both have a lot of that.</blockquote>

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