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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6099443" data-attributes="member: 82106">Oh, you would be quite surprised, there are MANY people who claim to not care one bit about class balance, and quite a few who have flat out stated that "magic is just better, it is ridiculous that a fighter could be as powerful as a wizard" or something to that effect. No doubt this thread will soon contain some such statements <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Well, many powers can certainly be seen as having a very strong or primarily meta-game aspect. Its quite possible to spin that as "player, fill in some sort of world explanation for this". Even powers that aren't explicitly meta can very often be construed that way in 4e. The decoupling of flavor from mechanics and all greatly assists this.Most powers can be seen also as plot coupons. Daily powers in particular, especially the less magical seeming ones (you can prefer other narrative explanations for magic, but see above, the player is still likely inventing in-world explanations). For the more unique martial powers you virtually have to see them as coupons since there's not usually a really plausible in-game explanation for why you can only use them once.APs and to a lesser extent HS are exactly plot coupon type meta-game resources. You can say HS are a form of 'hit point', but hit points have always been meta-game constructs anyway, so that doesn't change much. 4e's form of this is certainly mild compared to indie games, Feng Shui is one example, FATE and BW would of course be others.Yes, my point is that it isn't the structure of the subsystem people actually have a problem with. I think it has more to do with the narrow closed-ended powers. Of course changing the nature of powers has effects on their use in the meta-game, etc. OTOH I think a line can be hewed where you can get very flexible mechanics and still a more varied and interesting flavor than 4e powers have. Particularly in terms of things like daily powers for wizards and at-will or encounter powers for fighters, as examples (the rest fall somewhere in between anyway). One can most certainly try, and there are substantial benefits to be had in terms of increased system flexibility and ease of use.</blockquote>

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