The objective is to have fun. For me this needs a story element, but there are moments when you need to get miniatures out on a table and start laying out the areas of effect to get the common frame of reference going.

Things like the running joke in an AD&D campaign involving “speed vampire slaying”, which evolved into “how many vampires can you kill before thier initiative comes up and they flee in terror?” cannot happen in the story based system. In case anyone cares, the answer is that the limiting factor is actually the number of vampires you can get into one killing zone.

And no I never understood scalefour v protofour either.