No Compromises!

A recent thread on EN World asked "Is D&D 4 charmless". I don't know the real answer to that question (I think that's subjective). But it reminded me of something else and I answered (paraphrasing) "D&D 4 is shameless."

My reasoning behind this is based on my view that D&D 4 in a lot of ways is a design without compromises.

The goal of the D&D 4 design seems to focus on usability and play at the table, and the ability to facilitate a style of play where players face challenges in a fantasy world context, created using transparent mechanics and tools for helping the DM to gauge such challenges.

Other concerns are at best secondary, and there are no attempts to make compromises for other goals.
A common complaint is that certain rules are not designed for world building or for creating verisimilitude.
The rules regarding hit points and healing surges do little to explain what really "happens" in the game, but they are designed to support both long and short term resource management in the game (healing surge "triggers" per encounter and healing surges per day). Similar things can be said about the Encounter/Daily power rules or Action Points.
The DMG contains little information on how to build a "consistent" world (though as I pointed out, you can still use them for that purpose, but it is not what the DMG discusses much), it focuses on what kind of challenges are fair and appropriate for PCs.

Your AC and Reflex defense can be either based on Dex or Int. This gives Wizard a good AC and Reflex defense by default - but he doesn't get the previous edition staple "Mage Armor" to boost it further. One could still explain his half level and Int bonus to his defenses as a result of such spells, but the rules don't suggest anything like that. If it's something that typically applies all the time, it lessens playability if you have to keep book on something that can be taken for granted. The few occasions where it is not granted do not justify the book-keeping if you are focusing on utility and playability.

Skill Points have gone away. You are trained or your are not. The number of ranks in a skill do not matter at the table, only your final modifier. If it's not a concern at game time, simply it.
Certain skills don't even make an appearance - Craft, Perform, Profession are just gone. Very often, such skills are only character background, and they don't find much use during an adventure and the challenges you take. They are more for color then determining success and failure in crucial tasks, so off they go.

I must say, I admire this "No Compromises" approach. But I see that it can also be very off-putting or outright appalling.

If you can craft weapons and armor, it's something your character can do. It should be found in his mechanical representation. And damn, sometimes you might actually want to make a check or make it a challenge. But the designers figured out that this doesn't happen often enough to warrant spending character resources!)

You want to know if your character has still arrows sticking out from him or if he is fine and dandy. Restoring Morale with some shouts might be all nice and dandy, but then distinguish between my morale hit points and my injury hit points! But no, the designers figured that this would add to many special cases and make balancing classes too difficult or outright impossible.

Orcus (Clark Peterson, Necromancer Gamers) was one of the first EN Worlders to talk a little about his PHB 4E, and I remember he mentioned one of these little "No Compromises":
The Dragonborn - a race that had never been a D&D core race before, a race that is not Tolkien fantasy, and a race an unfamiliar player might not identify himself with first - was the first race described in the book. No compromises to utility - Dr comes before Dw and certainly way before Hu in alphabetic order. And that's the order people will search for if they are looking for a specific race description at the table.

I think that also makes 4E shameless. It is not ashamed by the fact that it has new fantasy races. It is not ashamed that certain rules don't "make sense" if they just work and provide interesting challenges.
A little of this "shamelessness" might have always been inherent to D&D - yeah, Dungeons with tons of monsters might not make a lot of sense, but let's gloss over that for the fun of it.

And yes, I think that also makes it okay if some people find this unappealing, bad taste, and do not like the design. Sometimes you might except these compromises - there are conflicting goals and you actually want both, and the game used to make these compromises. 4E is not that game.

There are, of course, also dangers to the "No Compromises" approach. I think a particular danger can be in regards to settings - one of the design goals is to ensure that every supplement can be used with every setting - but there is a risk that you eliminate the entire point of the setting - providing a unique fantasy world.
One could make a point and say that this actually is no longer a "No Compromise" approach - one hand, you want everything to be used with every setting, but on the other hand you want actually different feeling settings. A real "No Compromise" approach would require to have only one setting or to have elements that are specific to one settings and make certain supplements useless (or at least less useful. A book detailing the Astral Sea is not applicable for a setting that doesn't have the Astral Sea.)

I suppose one of the things WotC might want to do is to reintroduce compromises, even if it dilutes the original design goals. It might be what they need to do to bring certain players back. But they have to be very careful - aside from finding the right compromises for "lost" players, they also risk losing those like me that admire the fact that there are no compromises. Maybe future DMGs or an Unearthed Arcana for 4E can do a lot here.