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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6180199" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks for the info about Capes. I need to look into that game some more.I agree about the need for gravitas, and about your analysis of checkers (which I think is also relevant to [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s post a few upthread - orc and pie is not per se a dramatic narrative, in my view, even if one can impose a dramatic structure upon it). In my view, this is closely related to "4e can't do filler combats".As far as my 4e combat play is concerned, I think there a couple of things I do to help with this.One is external to the game, but is probably highly relevant - a long experience and enjoyment of pretty traditional fantasy RPGing, which makes my tolerance for the mechanical tropes, and associated colour (init rolls, attack rolls, numerical recording of capabilities and consequences, etc) very generous.Within the game, it is about using combat antagonists that are inherently connected to the broader narrative stakes (the most obvius is Undead to Orcus to Raven Queen) so that each round of the combat isn't just procedural in its significance (do the PCs survive the thugs so they can get on and achieve their goal) but poses dramatic stakes as well. Threatening NPCs, or requiring gates to be opened or closed by calling upon divine/arcane powers to which the PCs are connected, is another fairly common device that I've used.My problem with a lot of published adventures is that the goals really are just McGuffins (and this is so ubiquitous that that term has come to be used on these boards, and I assume elsewhere, to refer to any goal in an adventure), and the encounters completely interchangeable from adventure to adventure subject to superficial things like level and generic colour (this time its hobgoblins, next time its gnolls).An example of a combat of that sort that I have run is the "menagerie" room that is the first encounter in the Well of Demons in H2. But in that encounter - which involves some random dungeon dwellers and a ghoul - I inserted an animated statue taken from another part of the module, which creates allusions to the deeper backstory (which in turn I had linked in to the background of dwarves, and therefore the dwarf PC), and had the ghoul as the (now dead an reanimated) controller of the statue. The wizard PC then was able to focus on taking control of the statue as part of the resolution of the encounter. In the retelling, this is obviously far from the greatest story of all time. But in the actual play it's more than merely procedural, as the players (and their PCs) piece together the backstory, the signficance of the ghoul and it's connection to the statue, the wizard masters the arcane link between the two, etc.This is the sort of thing that I think 4e lends itself to pretty well for a game with fairly traditional combat resolution mechanics (because of the inherent pacing of its combat mechanics, its high degree of tolerance in resolution, and its flexibiity via p 42) - far better than classic games like RQ or RM, I think, which lack the degree of flexibility and tend to suffer from "sudden death" pacing. But the designers don't really seem to have even tried to bring this out in their adventure design, despite seeming to go to a fair bit of effort to seed it in both their NPC/monster design (espcially a lot of their controllers) and in their monster and setting backstories.BW has very little to say about resolving the story. It seems to want the dramatic tightness of a "story game" and the open-ended play of a classic fantasy campaign. Perhaps an unstable combination.4e tries to build in an endstory via Epic Destinies, but says bascially nothing about how this is to be realised other than GM fiat narrative - the better hints are in the fact that the highest level antagonists tend to be gods and primordials, which generates an implication that resolving conflicts at high level means resolving the fundamental cosmological struggles that are at the core of the setting. Again, though, the desire to preserve open-endedness and "replay value" seems to have compromised the willingness to actually talk about how the endgame is meant to work.</blockquote>

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