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Yes, monsters and NPCs use different rules, but does it have to be *so* obvious that creatures in the game world will be able to tell the difference?

The assumptions that this statement are built on are fundamentally wrong. Essentially, you are stating that the game rules define the world, rather than the other way around. While your view is trivially true (in that we are playing in an imaginary world, and thus are making it up as we go along), the opposite view is more fundamentally correct.

((Note, there is a tl;dr at the end.))

Games are not designed to create a world, they are designed to model a world. The imaginary world that D&D takes place in has its own laws of physics that are relatively similar (modulo magic) to our own, and these rules are obviously far more complex than anything we could put down in a 350 page book (after all, physicists haven't even discovered all of our rules yet, and just look at how many papers they publish). The rules of the game are an interface built to make the mechanics of the world understandable to someone not actually in the world. Since this is a game, they are also built to be fun to work with.

There are many different ways to approach this and build a ruleset. 3e went with a semi-simulationist method. The heart of this was that, just like the laws of physics apply everywhere to everything in the same ways, there is a unique and correct way to model every event in the world that can be used the same way everywhere. 4e explicitly discards that viewpoint for a more gamist perspective, and recognizes that 1) an event can be modelled in a multitude of ways and 2) different models have differing levels of appropriateness, depending on the situation. Just so I can abbreviate these later, I'm going to call 3e's approach the Single Model Method (SMM), while 4e uses the Multiple Model Method (MMM).

There's nothing inherently wrong with SMM. Most indie games go by this, and they work just fine, because they also build in a tremendous amount of leeway into their models. D&D has always been more complex than that, though - it's part of its unique nature as a game. As you increase the complexity of a game, the SMM starts to crack. The issue is that you have two opposing goals that you are trying to satisfy: keeping a consistent model that applies to all situations, and producing a simple model that is fun to use. Quite often there is a very simple, fun way to model something, but it only works in a limited situation. You can either restrict the domain of the rule and put that much more strain on the singularity of the model, or you can rework the rule into something more complex but more broadly applicable, harming its ability to function as a good game rule (there are of course even more ways to fail at this, such as writing a good limited rule but pretending that it's broadly applicable, or writing a simple broadly applicable rule that's simply bad). This strain was evident right from the beginning of 3e, with some rules being so complex for the sake of simulation that they were rarely used (such as grapple) and other rules only being useable within a specific domain and broken outside of that (basically, monsters). ((There were also rules that fell into the third group, such as Level Adjustments.))

4e instead embraces the MMM, which values the simplicity and fun of the model over the pursuit of a single perfect model. In doing so, it exalts the notion that different circumstances call for different rules for modelling the exact same event. In the limiting case, every individual character ever made would have hand-crafted rules designed to maximize their enjoyment, but of course that's impossible. Instead 4e settles for identifying broad areas that are similar enough to be able to easily accept the same model, but being comfortable with carving out new models when too much strain accumulates in one area of the rules. Though it may not have been obvious at first, this is in fact exactly what exception-based design means - start with a single simple model, and add complexity in potentially different ways to different areas as you develop. Throughout this is the recognition that it's only the model which is different in different places, while the underlying world that is being modelled is in fact the same, and actually still quite substantially different from any of the models. Frex, in the 'real world', the number of shield bashes a Dwarven Hammerer can use in a given length of time is a function of his skill, his tiredness, the openings the enemy presents, and any number of other factors. Neither a die roll nor an arbitrary allotment of abilities is an accurate model of this, but they're close enough that we can fill in the details ourselves.

That final point can be seen in our real lives as well. For example, our reality uses a single set of rules everywhere (there's still a narrow epistemological possibility this is wrong, but it gets narrower every year as science advances). Despite this, sociology and particle physics look completely different. It is implicitly recognized that the two fields cover different areas of the world, and so require different rules to model the world, despite the fact that at the bottom they're modelling the exact same thing (the interplay of quantum mechanical entities).

"But wait!", you say, "If we ask the same question of two fields of science (assuming that the question is within the domain of both), we'll get the same answer from them! This often doesn't happen in D&D. ::reference the number of shield bashes the Dwarven Hammerer can perform in a given unit of time and others:: Isn't this inconsistent and bad?"

The examples given are true, but the error in the conclusion drawn from them is that you are carrying over some implicit assumptions from science that are invalid within the domain of games that D&D operates in. Namely, science places a premium on accuracy and precision. As a result, any field of science will give approximately the same answer (modulo the field's own development and rigor). Games value different things: namely, fun and simplicity (really, just fun, but simplicity is often/usually a general requirement for fun). And indeed, if you look at 4e, the different fields (rules for players and rules for DMs) are largely the same in both fun and simplicity. This was not nearly as true in 3e, as the DM's side of the game was typically *much* more complex (it's fun value was really too subjective to quantify and compare here, but in my experience the player's side is more fun, even if the DM's side does offer its own unique rewards).

Now, exception-based design and MMM are not perfect ideals, and can go badly sour if one gets carried away with them. However, as far as I can tell, the 4e team did very well in their application of the technique so far, and have a good chance of keeping everything under appropriate control. All parts of the game work well with each other and are simple and fun to run, and that's really what counts here.


tl;dr: The rules don't define the world, they're a way of looking at the world. 3e tried to find a single way of looking that worked everywhere, but often wasn't ideal. 4e attempts to fine-tune the way the world looks depending on the situation, and so has a greater chance at maximizing the simplicity and fun of the rules. This does mean that, to us humans outside the game, some situations can be noticeably different depending on which side of the DM's screen we're on, but to the characters in the game world, there's no difference.

If a PC has an Encounter power, and an NPC has a similar power that recharges on a 2, the NPC will have more chances to use it in combat.Over the course of several combats (if, say, the npc is travelling with the party), I don't think it's a roleplaying error for the pc to recognize that the npc is better at the technique than he is.

Two things here.

1) If the ability recharges on a 2, that's badly modelled by an Encounter ability. It should clearly be an at-will, which allows a PC to use it a similar amount. Or, if the ability *is* properly an Encounter ability, then there is implicitly an additional ability which allows extra uses of it which would need to be created when you translate the ability into the player's rulespace. The differences between the way an NPC uses the rules and a PC does may be noticable, but should never be large, as there's a limit to how far you can stretch it and still state that you're modelling the same ability.

2) If the NPC is travelling with the players, he *may* be best modelled using PC rules. The NPC rules are designed to make it easy for the DM to run many monsters at once, and for the DM to get the most our of the monster without spending an excessive amount of time gaining rules mastery over it. An NPC that is in the limelight for a long period of time violates the second condition, and an NPC that is fighting with the players probably violates the first condition (I dunno, but I like letting the players run NPCs that help them).

Or maybe the recharge value was a typo from the adventure the DM is running, and the character wasn't suppose to be that good (that is, the rules are creating the game world, rather than modelling it). But in either case (especially since the players don't know which is the case), I think the PCs should react the same.

True, and I point back to (1) from my previous paragraph. If the NPC is recharging on a 2, then the player-rulespace analogue of that ability should probably be an at-will, or perhaps have an additional rule that allows for using it more often than once per encounter. If a player notices the NPC is much better with an ability than he is, there's nothing wrong with saying, "He has an extra ability which allows it. If you would like it too, we can see how to create it." If it was a typo, then the typo should be acknowledged and history retconned to line up with the proper rules (I am including simple bad game design under the 'typo' category for the purpose of this sentence).

This is particularly true because as the ruleset expands, there is an emergent quality to the world. There will probably be abilities created by layering other abilities or bonuses together (a sick example is the infamous Hulking Hurler build). These situations were not intended by designers, and so probably can't be described as modelling the game reality. Instead, they change the game reality.

This is where it gets slippery. Since there isn't an objective reality to measure things against, the rules *do* sort of create the reality at the same time as the reality creates the rules. However, it's also fine to acknowledge that sometimes the model just fails. Just because the rules state that the Hulking Hurler can exist doesn't mean that he can *actually* exist in the world. The rules are simply a model, and models by their nature are imperfect (the only perfect model is the world itself). If you press any model hard enough, you will get nonsensical results.

I mean, is the Hulking Hurler, Hurler of Neutron Stars, in your 3e game? Is PunPun? Is the Omniscifier? All of these are quite possible within the rules, but they don't 'change the game reality' unless you acknowledge them as being an accurate model. Note that the rules still aren't changing the world, you are. You are merely changing the world so that the model reflects it better. There is an implicit assumption in my argument that the model is sufficiently good. If your model states that everyone heals 1000hp a turn and can wield 4d8-damage greatswords in each hand with a 20ft reach, you can accept that the underlying world is sufficiently messed up to make that an accurate model, or you can accept that the model is totally cracked and needs to be replaced. That's completely up to you. Assuming a halfway decent ruleset, though, the model will be roughly correct most of the time.

Overall, the point I'm trying to make is that the rules are not objective. They are an imperfect, course-grained approximation of the world. What's more, 4e uses differently-shaped grains for different purposes, and so sometimes things will come out looking slightly differently. If anything is ever *way* different, though, that either indicates that there are underlying factors that you aren't acknowledging, or the rule was designed badly, not that people are actually physically different based on who is imagining them.