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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6099598" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm going to say it was level 2, maybe we were level 3, not more than that. The fighter was not BAD, VERY tough. He may have had a bit of a rough time too, we ran into a wandering monster in the gnome town, 20 orcs. Yeah, it was not really much of a fight. The fighter and one other character, a Monk? went up and tried to hold them off, after me and the wizard tried to pick off one or two. We actually had luck on our side, the 2 front guys managed to stay up for about 3 rounds with several orcs around them. The wizard was only marginally effective. He blasted a few with BH, but it didn't really slow them down much. I killed a couple with my mace and Lance of Faith, healed the fighter and the monk both a couple bajillion times, and then we all went down. The monks "Flurry of Blows" (whatever its called in DDN, I really haven't read the monk) worked pretty well. If there had been say 10 orcs we might have saved a couple characters. As it was we killed like 5 of them and mauled a couple others on our way to Valhalla. It was fun, if a bit of a silly lesson in "no, the DM should not take the Wandering Monster Table literally..."Well, lets take AP, which is the most obvious case. What does spending an AP mean? Surely it isn't really very closely tied to anything in the game world. Perhaps you could say it represents "going all out", but frankly if you're in a REAL sword fight and you aren't already going all out something is seriously wrong with you. Instead it more plausibly doesn't represent ANYTHING in the game world at all. Instead it represents exactly what it is, a 'coupon' the PLAYER can redeem for extra consideration. In otherwords it isn't a simulationist construct (where simulation is meaning "the game rules define in-world reality"), it is a gamist/narrativist construct (either it is just there to make the game a more fun game, or it is there to help regulate/facilitate telling a story). In this case I suspect the primary motive of the designers was gamist. They thought it would be a more fun and interesting game if the player could unleash a mighty alpha-strike by having an extra standard action now and then, and fun to manage a point pool of APs. The player/group could also use it in a narrativist sense where the player decides that his character at a certain point in the story would say "become totally enraged" and "go berserk" and so he blows his AP and loe-and-behold this contrivance causes the mechanics of the game to let him do something unusual.A daily power for a fighter could be seen the same way. The fighter unleashes Unstoppable Advance and the player narrates this as his enemy mistakenly provides an opening and the fighter relentlessly shoves the foe back, creating whatever tactical benefit. Obviously you can use some things in various ways. A skill check could also be used to seize the narrative, if that convention is in use at your table. The dashing paladin makes a CHA check to cause the elf maiden to swoon for him, now she's in love! What will happen when her father finds out!!!! Clearly this is a vastly different way of playing in many respects. There are of course also a wide variety of techniques and variations which are possible. You could to some extent engage in this sort of thing using more simulationist oriented rules systems, but generally it helps to have a system that encourages the players to take control and generate engagement/risk for the characters, and to do crazy stuff. 4e is pretty at that, and earlier editions aren't really. AD&D characters are just too fragile for one thing, and depend far more on a sort of magic that is so open-ended that it tends to hog all of those situations. At higher levels where PCs are less risk-averse the game just gets kinda wonky and hard to run IME.</blockquote>

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