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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6241315" data-attributes="member: 6688937">"Mentally challenging" can mean a lot of things, which of those apply isn't clear from the article. For instance, putting people in a morally or ethically challenging situation can light up the brain quite a bit. Similarly, a mystery is obviously a mental challenge. However, neither of those gains much traction against what people normally refer to as Gamist play. I think that that's disservice to solving mysteries, but maybe not so much for the moral/ethical crises. Additionally, given the timeframe, it could also refer to a desire for game mechanics which are not overly simple. (I mean, I pray it doesn't, but....)Is there no risk of failure? Is 4e really D&D on "easy mode"? If not, if the level of challenge is not vanishingly small, then it can be approached in a gamist fashion, taking away pride/enjoyment from the sense of accomplishment. I mean, the 4e skill challenge takes scenes and encounters that were previously very nebulous and hard to "rate" (Old-School games highly dependent on DM fiat) and gives them numerical ratings/difficulties, in effect turning what used to be almost purely narrativist/drama-resolved situations into lightly gamist mechanics. ...which makes me wonder to what extent "DM fiat" is a pejorative against drama-resolution...but that's probably another rant entirely.If its implicit, I must say it totally whizzed by me (and I consider myself a fairly sophisticated consumer). It certainly didn't reveal itself when I ran and played 4e for about a year. I have witnessed no 4e groups playing that way. Even on these boards, you seem to be in a distinct (if welcome) minority. I didn't stick with 4e long enough to pick up DMG2, so maybe Robin Laws does give some magical advice there. I mean, I love our conversations, but from everything I've seen, you have a very unusual take on 4e. I recall being stunned quite a bit during our first encounters.Now, my (and perhaps  @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=85870" target="_blank">innerdude</a> 's) question to you is: How much of your experience is the way 4e is played by the book, and how much is it you? I mean, Narrativist play doesn't require a whole lot of rules. Its one of the things that makes writing Narrativist games a bit tricky, I suspect. Even Edwards acknowledges that people play narrativistly with/despite rules that don't support it at all, even with rules that fight against it.I don't think 4e is particularly antagonistic to narrativist play, but certainly, the bulk of human effort developing the game was put into devising a mildly challenging tactical minis game. That's just obvious for the reasons innerdude and others have mentioned. Strip away the rest (there's not much) and you still have that midlly challenging (rules as suggested) tactical minis game.I certainly didn't see it. I think its hidden much deeper than you do. I mean, I don't wanna dig out my 4e core books and go quote-fishing, but I recall a lot...a LOT of emphasis on designing interesting and challenging encounters, less but still significant advice about to most effectively use monsters of various types to wage challenging combat encounters. For the players, there was a lot of advice about effective teamwork and...well sheets and sheets of combat powers, a few of which had notable utility outside of combat. All of it with little notes about "appropriate" levels of difficulty. Outside of combat, well, we took that and made it a mini-game called a skill challenge, so it could be more like combat. We gave them strict difficulties just like combat and then published a system that was so heavily tested that it was errata'd almost before the books were out the door. I'd also note that I don't recall very much talk at all about how to use the presented fluff to hook players into encounters and scenes, nor anything about setting up the types on thesis/anti-thesis. "Interesting" as far as I can recall the 4e core books, was a word that applied only to tactics.4e didn't talk about "skilled play". However, I suspect that that may be because such talk was less PC in 2008 that it was in the 1970's. (Also, you're trying to sell this game, you don't want to scare off your consumers.) However, the strong and consistent emphasis on appropriate challenge levels and creating tacticly interesting encounters is Gamist, not Simulationist or Narrativist.I disagree here. If there is a level of skill required to play Fate, my experiences would indicate that its very small indeed. Its certainly nothing like any version of D&D I've played. I have a few Narrativist games on my hard drive where skill doesn't even enter into it (at least, I can't see how it would).Good heavens! Why would that be an impediment to Narrativist play? What about it prevents the DM/players from presenting dramatic theses and challenging them? Nothing that I can see. Narrativism lives in the color, not the X's and O's of the tactical game. Talking to you on this board has helped me recognize the "mere color" aspect of challenges as a narrativist strength of 4e, not a hindrance at all.So...you're figuring that most 4e groups are using The Plane Above now? Is there anything about that process of changing mythic history that wouldn't also apply to previous editions?...to other games entirely?As far as the default color goes...sure, its as good as any other, I suppose. It does reflect a sort of generic D&D-ized Indo-European mythology. However, more below...That's interesting. I don't know how it works, so I'll have to reserve judgement.I would say that 4e's challenge maths are neutral in this regard. Yes, you can use them to present whatever flavored challenge you want, but no, there is nothing inherent in them that requires or even encourages you to ensure that the players are facing meaningful thematic decisions. In fact, quite the opposite, great pains are taken to make sure that all PCs will sustain a minimum level of effectiveness in all situations, making it easier for the DM to completely ignore any theses that his players may want to address, and for the players to play without ever feeling obliged to address a thesis as well. The priest of the Raven Queen will be substantively unaffected if the party never encounters undead, Orcusian cultists, or demons. Even the Quest mechanics you mention above don't do anything to require addressing significant theses, but can easily be used to do so.Which, I think, is a place we will disagree on the impact which the default color/fluff has on play. While it is an arena that Narrativist players will find room for rather simplistic theses, its presence removes the impetus for the GM player to engage in any deeper thematic play. That is, a GM can approach his monster selection and indeed adventure design in a way that is very passive wrt theme or thesis. Contrast that with a game like Fate, where such a thing is practically impossible (but the maths are equally, if not more facile.)Me neither. It's one of the little things that makes me question the utility/completeness of the GNS viewpoint. The majority of games play that way, and if I can't discern between difficulty-for-the-character and difficulty-for-the-player then I can't distinguish between Gamism and Simulationism. And yet...that would seem to be a fundamental experience for that elusive thing folks like to call immersion.I think there's an important distinction between player-side tactics and character-side tactics. I would say that if a game has heavy tactical play on the player side...its probably Gamist. Player-side tactics enable "skillful play". At the design stage, "Step on Up" would be, I think, the motivating factor for developing an extensive Player-side tactical inventory. Character-side tactics can be abstracted to fit whatever agenda is running around, I think.However, I've come to disagree with the GNS theory about how exclusive the play agendas are from each other, so that may be coloring my thinking as well.If Gamism is the player responding to a challenge of skill (or luck), it seems fairly straightforward to me that being able to lable things with a "degree of difficulty" is an enabling device for making sense of that kind of game.</blockquote>

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