thread: 2010-08-19 : One of my favorite GenCon conversations
On 2010-08-26, J. Walton wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I'm having trouble agreeing with your "conventional games are really good at fictional positioning" claim when thinking about my experiences with 4E and the little of 3E that I've played (the only D&D I've ever played, actually). Can you help me figure this out?
In my experience, the fights in 4E never really entered the fiction at all. They were all about the DICE portion of your diagram: minis on a map, moves listed on the sheet, real things in the real world. It was only between fights that we ever really seemed to encounter the fiction rather than minis-on-a-map. And the fictional parts seemed to have very little impact on the minis-on-a-map parts of fights; they seemed like two disconnected games married uncomfortably together.
Are there places where the rules direct you to feed back into the fiction that we were ignoring? Because that feedback-into-fiction seemed optional and not critical, which left me really frustrated with 4E in the same way that the kinds of "naked trait invocation" games could be frustrating.
