Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5995605" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've run this by my group - which has a fighter and a paladin PC - and they think of it as mixed (much like hit points are often treated in a mixed way).Sometimes it's "associated" - ie the fighter is doing something that upsets the enemy and draws its attention. Sometimes it's pure metagame - in effect, a debuff token that the player of the fighter has placed on the GM's NPC or monster.The paladin power "Valiant Strike" - +1 to hit for each adjacent foe - is another example that's a bit like this. Is it "associated" - the paladin's ire is raised the more foe's that surround him or her? Or is it a metagame buff that encourages the player of the paladin to play the PC as valiant, because doing so (ie charging into a group of foes) draws bonuses to hit? I reckon either, or a bit of both, depending on player and group and context and mood.I like this flexibility in 4e, and find this sort of mixing of game and metagame one of the attractive features of D&D. The metagame aspect encourages a certain sort of fiction, which the same abilities, interpreted in a more ingame fashion, then help reinforce.Applying this back to marking: at the pure metagame level it encourages the GM to focus on the fighter, or alternatively gives the fighter multiple attacks, either of which outcomes tends to make the fighter the focus of the melee action, which reinforces that s/he's the threatening one on which the monsters are focused - which then flavours the mark away from pure metagame to an ingame thing as well.Provided you like the fairly stereotypical fiction these sorts of mechanics tend to produce, I think they work pretty well.</blockquote>

Verification