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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3758404" data-attributes="member: 42582">A very interesting thread. In my view, all the 4e design threads reinforce the obvious conclusion that 4e will not support a 1st ed style of play.4e is simply not intended to support this style of play - where, for example, a bad choice by the players means that the evening's fun has been stolen by the NPCs.Exactly right. In 4e the onus is on the GM to provide the players with challenges that they overcome by playing their PCs. The world does not "carry on" in the background, oozing verisimilitude. Rather, it is a bundle of "game elements" for the GM to use in order to build challenges.Will this produce contrived plots? In a sense, yes, but only in the sense in which basically all heroic and genre narrative is contrived.But 3E, while perhaps capable of handling this play style, is pretty clearly not aimed at it. Hence all those people (of whom I am one) who think that 3E games play very differently from 1st ed games. (And I'm surprised that no-one in this thread has yet referred to <a href="http://verisimilitude" target="_blank">Monte Cook's column</a> in which he discussed this very aspect of 3E mechanical design, and flagged a move to per-encounter abilities as consistent with that design.) 4e is just the next step in an existing trend.As Monte explains in his column, this was not part of the design goals even of 3E.Again, 4e is pretty explicitly not aimed at supporting this sort of resource-management playstyle.In real life, people have all sorts of reasons for acting "irrationally" from the point of view of resource management: impetuousness, anger, a taste for the dramatic, a love of risk, etc. And much genre narrative presents stories where these sorts of motivations, rather than rational resource management, drive the adventure. I think 4e is looking to support this style of play. Per-encounter resources make it possible in a way that per-day do not. Of course, they don't therefore mandate it, and what I'm interested in is what other mechanics may be introduced to support this play style.Agreed with both these pasages. Between heroic passions and the tensions of the plot, the pace of the game is intended to be driven by something other than the rational management of resources. In the Gary Gygax 1st Ed DMG sense, it will no longer reward good play. But then, good play will no longer be defined in those terms.Agreed. The game will support a different sort of open-ended adventure - one in which the climax is known in advance, at least in general terms (unlike the games in which a delay can mean the NPCs preempt the PCs), and is guaranteed to be climactic, but in which the path to it is not predetermined.But hand-waving, while easy for experience GMs, is very hard for inexperienced ones. And it seems that 4e, like 3E before it, is aimed mostly at supporting inexperienced GMs. Thus it will expressly abandon the "operational considerations" approach to play. Whether or not this is a misjudgement of the market only time will tell. My own feeling is that it is not, and that Hong is correct with respect to the zeitgesit.I suspect that the 4e designers have asked and answered that question. We can infer their answer from the direction in which they seem to be taking the game.It is not quite true that all the simulationism is being dropped. In many ways it is just going more high-concept: a good part of the fun of play is meant to be derived from the experience of "my guy" cutting down hordes of mooks before blowing up the dragon. I haven't seen any indication that the designers intend to introduce mechanics to support thematically-oriented play (eg like Spiritual Attributes or Fate Points that are activated by the pursuit of player-determined character goals). But much of the tension between simulationism and gamism seems to be going. For example, the monster design rules look like they will be much closer to Tunnels and Trolls, than to 3E's simulationist nightmare.</blockquote>

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