mostly I don't get it
I haven't been here for a while because a) I was disappointed to see this particular part of the forum turn into all edition wars, all the time, and b) I realized that I don't get 4e – I don't know what I can do with it.
That's not true in the broadest sense – you have the players roll up characters and you tell them the adventures they have. I could make a railroad with 4e pretty easy. But it seems like, in general, with the new edition, you have to do a lot more conceptual work to read the tea leaves of what happens when you look at the game mechanics and roll the dice. I've always been kind of concerned about that, but a few weeks ago I realized I basically have no idea what goes on in a 4e fight.
Ok, hit points have always been pretty abstract, sure, but simply enough: when somebody swings a sword at a PC, and hits, and gets to roll damage dice, they've made some sort of contact. If they miss, there is no real contact.
New edition, we have things like the pally's divine challenge and the fighter powers that inflict damage on a miss and things that suggest that ablating hit points is basically a matter of gaining – to use a term that has a different technical meaning in 4e – combat advantage over your foes, to the point where you can dispatch them with a final blow. Which is fine as a system, and which is why I don't mind fighters doing damage on a miss out of general principle. But.
How the hell do you narrate that? The transfer of combat superiority? "You see the knight's parries weaken, his movements grow more hesitant"? Ok, but over and over again, fight after fight after fight after fight? "You hit, he misses" may be rote, but at least it's short. This is work. Conceptual work that the rules don't seem to cover, conceptual work that you have to do over and over again – unless whenever a fight comes up, break immersion, play a little loading screen, go into the abstract (but possibly fun) combat mode, and then go back into narrating.
Or take minions, a concept I don't really have a broad problem with, except if – as I've read – there's a huge gulf between minions and non-minions in their ability to take punishment. What do I mean? Well, you could implement minions in 3.x if you wanted, and they might fit in fairly well, because in 3.x it's perfectly possible to drop a "regular" monster in one shot. In 4e it appears that you have the monsters that drop in a hit, and the monsters you swing at and swing at and swing at until you finally manage to skewer the beastie. Over and over again. In – not each fight, perhaps, but many of them.
To take the minion vs. divine challenge example, how do you describe that? Because here's how I'd like to describe it: "The paladin stops, bellows, and points his sword at the kobold. 'Stop, cur, and bring your blade at me, if you have any honor at all!' But the kobold just stares agape and trembles as its sickle drops nervelessly from its fingers. Sobbing, it curls up in a heap." Sounds like something that could happen! But so now morale failure is a possible consequence of losing all your hit points? It goes back to the roots of wargaming, I suppose, where a "killed" unit can either be destroyed or abandoned or disabled or any number of things that render it combat-incapable, but that's a little abstract for a game that deals with scenarios where you could (in your imagination) see all the characters' faces.
There seem to be a ton of little narrative hurdles like that, and until I see how or if people deal with that I don't think I'm going to buy into this new edition because I can't see what it looks like in my head.
Addendum:
Also – if 4e is fundamentally about killing horrible monsters, then the part when I kill the horrible monsters should be the very last spot where I have to break immersion in order to play the game!
