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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5892525" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree that build choice implies ingame choice by the PC. When I roll up my PC, I choose where to put the stats. Clearly this is a choice being made by the player, not the character.The rules have always suggested that items bought with starting money might reflect an inheritance - this also is not the character choosing things ingame (you don't generally choose your own inheritance), it is a player choice operating at the metagame level.Likewise choosing a martial power - this can be you choosing how your PC will excel, rather than your PC choosing to learn a new technique.As for the "power" wording, it's a bit like "hit points" - D&D has a long history of blurring the ingame/metagame boundary in some of its rules elements. Whether this is a strength or a flaw I'm not sure, but I think it does contribute to the flexibility of the system.In my view the 4e fighter is always trying hard. The player get to choose when trying becomes success.And daily powers do control the dice (among other things). They can give bonuses to hit, increase the crit range (which is analogous to increasing the chance of rolling a crit), or increase the damage range. They can do other things do, of course.Because it would produce suck-ier play? Because it would remove the control over play that the character currently enjoys, by getting to choose when to use daily powers.That might be a fun game. It might be balanced. Are you familiar with the rules for Adrenal Moves in Rolemaster, which resemble this a little bit? You roll to initiate the move, and then to sustain it - every roll gets harder, and when you come out of the move you have penalties roughly proportional to how long you sustained it. This is something like a system of encounter powers for fighters with effectiveness linked to die rolls rather than player choice (although the player gets to choose when to try and initiate the move).But it would be quite a different game from 4e.This right here is the respect in which it's like an action point. Obviously it's not identical - whether one sees that as part of the charm of D&D (it has all these fiddly, focused metagame mechanics like saving throws (in pre-3E D&D), hit points, martial encounters and dailies, etc) or as a problem is a matter of taste. For me, at least, it's something I like about 4e. It gives play a type of invested visceral character that I think a more abstract action point system might lack.Huh? In the fiction, the PCs tell the fighter to stop the goblin. The fighter tries, and does or doesn't depending on the mechanical options available to the player, and how the dice roll.At the table, the other players say to the player of the fighter, "Can you use Stop Thrust?" "No, already used it today." "Okay, does anyone have an interrupt that can get the fighter in front of the goblin so that when it keeps moving it will draw an oppy?" "Nope, out of them too." "Bugger. I guess the goblin will get away." That's one way of working out, via the procedures of the game, that within the fiction the figthter tried but failed to stop the goblin.Maybe my table is radically diffrent from others', but at my table these sorts of conversations - in which the players do their best to deploy their avaialable mechanical resources to succeed in their goals for their PCs - produce emotional investment, immersion in the fictional situation, and help make the game worth playing. (And the best descriptions of this sort of play that I'm aware of in published RPG rulebooks are by Luke Crane in the Burning Wheel books, especially the Adventure Burner.)AEDU on its own doesn't produce narrativism. I think it supports it to some extent, though, by giving the players a degree of control that supports player-driven PC protagonism. To use the example of an escaping goblin, when this happens (say, in Runequest) just because of a series of bad dice rolls, that's one thing. But in 4e, when it is the result of a whole lot of player choices about how to manipulate and spend their mechanical resources, and the priorities that those choices reflect, it an start to become something else.I would have nothing against this, although I think it has cons as well as pluses - there are dailies like Comeback Strike, for example (2W damage and spend a surge) which have no obvious Enouncter power to piggyback on, and cause no narrative trickiness at all because they are very obviosly not tecniques but just metagame plays ("Now's when my guy Comes Back! Take that, you fiends!").But as I've posted upthread, and many times on other threads, because of the other features of 4e that reward build specialisation (eg synergies with feats, power/build interaction, paragon path etc) there is already going to be high level of coherence in the typical player's power choices, I think.</blockquote>

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