NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5397819" data-attributes="member: 42582">That makes your reasoning clearer to me.My response (not in the sense of rebuttal, but in the sense of what I think is another factor that can be brought to bear to head of the danger that you are pointing to) is to emphasise improvisation - the readiness of the GM to follow the lead of the players, and to construct situations that allow the players to find their own path through them (and, if it comes to it, out of them).I'm not sure what best suits a novice GM. Part of the difficulty with 4e being the contemporary "gateway" RPG is that its mechanics - the need for battlemaps, for example, and the fact that a skill challenge can fail as a satisfying action-resolution exercise if the GM doesn't work hard to keep the mechanics tightly integrated with and responsive to the fiction - strongly favour preparation. In my own experience improvisation is nevertheless possible, but I think you're right to say that in improvisng in this way I'm drawing on a lot of GMing experience.But 4e also doesn't favour the sort of approach that you appear to favour, of strong attention to world detail which then allows the players to choose their own path through the sandbox. My intuition, at least, is that a sandbox is facilitated by purist-for-system simulatonist mechanics, because those sorts of mechanics help both players and GM form the sort of understanding of the ingame causal dynamics of the gameworld that facilitates high-quality sandbox play. And 4e is notoriously not a purist-for-system game.I know that <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/278034-d-d-4th-edition-hack-fiction-first-playtest.html" target="_blank">LostSoul is doing some interesting things</a> with his 4e sandbox, but I think it's a bit different from a typical sandbox. For example, in place of purist-for-system mechanics it relies heavily on both GM metagaming at prep and player metagaming during play, and this isn't necessarily easy for a novice GM either. And certainly there is nothing in the 4e rulebooks that would help a novice set up a game like this.The upshot might be that 4e, then, is in some sense the wrong game to be the gateway. A better gateway on the sandboxy side would be something like Basic Roleplaying - good, clear, easy to prep and adjudicate purist-for-system mechaincs. A better gateway on the importance + improvisation (or "button-pushing") side might be something like HeroQuest.4e, by trying to be tactically crunchy (which I like) but also being better suited (I think) to button-pushing roleplaying than sandbox roleplaying, is actually perhaps a fairly hard game for a novice to come to grips with. This discussion has given me a better sense of how 4e, in the hands of inexperienced RPGers, might be more likely than (for example) Basic D&D to end up as a bog-standard railroad that, at the level of actual player engagement, is a boardgame/dice-rolling exercise, because the space of mechanical decision-making is all that the players have left. That also gives me a handle on how it might come across as WoW-ish, because presumably the description I've just given is pretty well suited to WoW.</blockquote>

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