I started playing D&D in the early 1980s with Moldvay Basic, Cook Expert and then Gygax's AD&D. I've never played "Gygaxian" D&D. Influenced by the admonishments in the rulebooks, and in Lewis Pulsipher articles in White Dwarf, I tried to, but had no real interest in or talent for running it and my players had no real interest in playing it.
For the sort of play that I enjoy, 4e is a better system than AD&D. It's very obviously not aimed at Gygaxian play. But to infer from that that it's not D&D seems to give greater weight to Gyax's design intent, or preferred approach to play, rather than to the full range of stuff that people were actually trying to do with classic D&D back in those days. Reading Forum in Dragon Magazine from that time, and looking at the articles, I think there was a range of different approaches being taken - and if I had to characterise what I believe to have been the dominant trend, I would say it was a drift from Gygaxian play to setting-heavy, system-focused simulationism. I'm reluctant to say, though, that it therefore wasn't D&D.
Well, a GM who (i) establishes potential conflict based on signals (more or less explicit) sent by the players, and who (ii) frames those scenes in such a way that the PC in question is able to ride back to town on a pony, isn't doing a very good job of GMing in the "modern" fashion.
Nothing in the 4e DMG suggests that the game should be run like that. (Admittedly, it doesn't say a lot about scene-framing in general.)
Also, the idea that a GM will establish potential conflict based on signals (more or less explicity) sent by the players isn't that new. "What is Dungeons and Dragons" was published by Puffin (Penguin) Books in 1984. From memory, each of its 3 example PCs has conflict built into his or her backstory (the fighter is from a family kicked off their farm; the wizard has a rival college of magic; and the halfing I think has some sort of tale of down-and-out urban squalor). And the sample adventure for these 1st level PCs incorporates elements of the rival college of magic. It's not quite Burning Wheel, but it's not random generation, or pure sandboxing, either. Character-driven play, with GMs creating situations focused particularly on those PCs' conficts, has been around for a while now.
I don't agree that 4e's rules are more prescriptive. They just prescribe different things. (Moldvay Basic had a whole checklist to go through for scenario design. And both Basic and AD&D had discussions of dugneon design, treasure placement etc which (i) seem fairly presriptive to me, in the sense that they tell me what the designer thinks a good dungeon will involve, and (ii) seem somewhat prescriptively to presuppose that "the dungeon" will figure prominently as a focus of play.
I do agree that 4e focuses on different things. I think you're right that an encounter is a scene in which there is a goal and one or more obstacles - and hence conflict (or "a challenge", to use 4e jargon). The PHB and DMG make it clear that exploration - "scenes without challenges" - is important but subordinate, a bridge between challenges. And there is a clear suggestion in the DMG that exploration for its own sake be downplayed, as potentially boring.
I can only speak to my own experience, and do my best to make sense of the experiences of others. What broghammerj says here seems to me consistent with what I was saying. I would want to add - until you've played that PC, not only will you not know his/her noncombat stuff, but you won't know the combat stuff either. (The retraining rules in 4e are in my view essential, given that - except for very simple builds like ranger archers - it is hard to know how something will play out until you build it and try it.)
I think that in 4e, both combat and skill challenges (the two core action resolution engines) support "playing on the day" - learning new stuff about the gameworld, the PCs, the NPCs, in the course of play. They're fairly obviously modelled on/inspired by other game systems with that explicit goal (for skill challenges this is transparent!). The 4e designers are on record as having regard to the indie design scene (here is Heinsoo; here is Mearls). I think they set out to turn D&D into a "modern" game, and did a fairly good job of it.
I don't agree with the "do what you want", but I do agree with the "tookit" vs "proscriptive". I see a resemblance to the Burning Wheel rulebooks, which are full of advice to stick with what the designers have included, because it is in there to make the game a better game.
I think this is reflective of different play focuses in the mechanics. When the mechanics are conceived of as primarily serving a simulationist purpose, then the "tool kit" approach makes sense. If you want to simulate something different, or differently, you tweak and twiddle. As a result of this sort of thing, Rolemaster has probably a dozen or more initiative systems in print, and HARP has 3 or 4 different combat systems.
When the mechanics are focused more on non-simulationist metagame goals - of distributing narrative authority in certain ways, for example, or mediating between creation and exploration in certain ways (and I think these two goals are related) - then to me at least it makes more sense for the designers to say "Hey, we've got these procedures here which, if you follow them, will give you the experience we're offering. Don't follow them, and we offer no guarantees." With these sorts of mechanics, the promise is "If you follow them, you'll get the experience you want from this game." Whereas the classic simulationist mechanics are more along the lines of "Here's a suggestion as to how you might model this - if you want a different model, tweak away to your heart's content". Different goals, different guidelines. To me, this is indicative of the different approach of the 4e rules.
My impression is that Paizo, and PF, were built on adventures. Indeed, that Paizo's reason for going ahead with PF was to keep in print a set of rules that people could use to play their adventures.
I said that PF, the game - which includes both rules and adventure paths - seems to be focused on adventures. Certainly, fans of Paizo seem to mention their adventuers frequently as a strong point. Whereas, at least on these forums, I rarely see fans of 4e mentioning WotC's adventures as a strong point of the game.
As for the style of play that 4e supports, I believed that I've discussed it often enough, in threads in which you have participated, that I would have thought it might be well enough known by now, at least by anyone to whom it matters. (Posts #262 and #278 in the is-D&D-about-combat thread give a reasonable account of it.)
What's the double standard? I don't particularly care for 3E, and therefore assume that I wouldn't particularly care for PF either. You, as far as I can tell from your posting history, don't particularly care for 4e. I'm trying to diagnose a difference between them, to do with their different orientations towards exploration and creation. You yourself, in the thread about kobolds and their "shifty" power, seemed to accept that there was such a difference, given that, in that thread, you complained that 4e generates too high a burden of creation for GMs and players.
What do you think is the difference between 3E and 4e?
Actually, nearly everyone who comments on WotC's 4e modules complains that they don't reflect the encounter design guidelines in the DMG and DMG2.
Given that no one seems to like 4e adventures, and that WotC themselves have indicated (at GenCon) that they're planning on revising their approach to adventure writing, I think that the inference to incompetence may well be warranted.
But in any event, 4e fairly obviously doesn't support traditional module design. Just one example - traditional module design depends upon the backstory being a secret within the purview of the GM. For 4e, on the other hand - at least as far as the default setting is concerned - a big chunk of the backstory is set out in the PHB, for the players to take into account when building their PCs. What does this 4e approach remind me of? It reminds me of the advice on "big picture", setting design, character building etc in the Burning Wheel Adventure Builder - which is non-traditional advice.
Coincidence? Projection? Or the result of the 4e team doing what they said at the time they were doing, and taking seriously the lessons of indie RPG design? Different people obviously have different views on this - but given that everyone hates the WotC modules, but some people at least like their ruleset, I prefer to impute competence to mechanical design and incompetence to adventure design.
See references above - particularly the Heinsoo one.
And are you really saying that you see no resemblance between skill challenges and the action resolution mechanics in games like HeroQuest and Maelstrom Storytelling? Do you really not see a significant difference in the way that 4e treats campaign backstory, distributing it so liberally through the PC-build rules?
You don't need a gametheory post-doc to run a character and situation-based game. I did it as a teenager using 1st ed AD&D rules (bizarrely enough drawing inspiration from Oriental Adventures - although the focus of that book is highly simulationist, this actually produces quite rich PCs and situations, and in play we drifted the Honour mechanics from what I think was envisaged in the design).
The idea that simulationist play, or Gygaxian (=exploration-heavy) gamism, is somehow the easy or default approach, is something I strongly disagree with.
Well, quite. I think we're in agreement here.
