Thanks for sharing this -- you're right, this stuff speaks directly to my concerns about player responsibilities in a non-railroaded story-heavy campaign.
No worries - I'm glad it was interesting.
I've been wondering lately what an adventure optimized for non-railroaded story-heavy play would look like. You and S'mon seem to use adventures/APs a lot but with heavy alterations. What would an adventure type product look like if it were optimized for this style of play?
Now that's an excellent question!
When I look at an adventure module, I'm normally looking for three things: maps/geography (I don't particularly enjoy doing my own, but I can if I have to); history that I can use to flesh out my backstory; NPC antagonists that look useable in my game (preferably with some interesting situations around them, though I'm not too bad at doing situation myself). So for me the easier a module makes it to use its maps/geography, to clearly indentify its history/backstory, and to work out the NPCs/situations in it, the better.
So dot points under clear headings are good. Whereas short-story style slabs of text are bad. When I'm reading a module I don't want to feel I'm reading a story; rather, I want to be able to picture setting the scene up at my table, and imagine how my players might do stuff with it. In that respect a traditional dungeon format is better than a more 2nd-ed-ish, pages of backstory format; but the traditional dungeon tends not to have what I'm looking for in terms of backstory/situation (of course I can make up my own, but then all the dungeon is giving me is maps).
4e adventures suffer badly from the pages-of-backstory problem (at least the three I have: H2, P2, E1). They tend to have nice maps. And they have some interesting NPCs/situations. I've used most of the episodes in H2, but in a different sequence and at different levels from what it suggests (the easy scaling of 4e helps here), and with the overall backstory heavily tweaked and dropping the "home base" aspect (Seven-Pillared Hall). It worked for my game because it had goblins, demons, devil-worshippers and a Vecna-cultist as antagonists, all of which fitted well with my players and their PCs. (Though the duergar slave-traders ended up as friends rather than enemies of the PCs.)
A d20 module I've got some nice use out of is "Wonders out of Time" by Eden Odyssey. It has little "vignettes" of ruins left over from an ancient empire. I used a couple of these as maps plus backstory for scenarios dealing with the "Fallen Nerath" aspect of my game, which is particularly important to one of the PCs. The backstory was easy enough to tweak to fit the default 4e history and cosmology, and I added in my own situation and antagonists.
Anyway, those are some potted thoughts.
This type of story-heavy play that BW seems to be going for where it's really personal and character-centric is more appealing to me than the high fantasy/epic quest style. I find most quests (ie plotted story that doesn't really require much player input or tie into their characters, other than the fact that they're really powerful and heroic) to be cheesy and cliched, and I'm not very good at coming up with anything better.
My impression of at least one way of playing D&D - that dates back at least to the latter period of 1st ed AD&D - is that the adventure is seeded by some sort of quest that speaks to the players in very generic terms (eg they're playing LG and NG PCs, and the cleric of Pelor asks for help), and then it rolls along in a fashion more-or-less indifferent to both the players and the quest goal until you get to the end, at which point you find the princess, or the prisoners, or the ancient relic, or whatever else it was that the mentor/patron NPC wanted.
I hate that sort of adventure. I don't want to run it as a GM. I don't want to play it as a player. If there is a quest (eg in my 4e game one of the PCs is reassembling the Sceptre of Law (= Rod of 7 Part)s so that he can kill Mishka the Wolf Spider once and for all) then I want it to inform the adventure along the way, so the experience 9say) of fidning and reassembling the Rod will be different from the experience of tracking down the Orcus cultists (eg in my game, the first brought the PCs into conflict with a hydra spawn of the primodial Bryakhus in which a fragment of the Rod was embedded, and also into a challengeing relatinship with the duergar, who were hording a fragment of the Rod themselves; whereas the second meant trekking down a miles-long stairway into the Underdark and finding an ancient temple to Orcus permeated by the Shadowfell, and sealed off from the rest of the Underdark by Death Giants geased by Torog and the Raven Queen - which not only made the "Orcus" experience different from the "Rod" experience, but also raised issues for the Raven Queen devotees in the party, those members of the party who are opposed to Torog, and the dwarf with a dwarven thrower artefact that is on a crusade to slay all giants).
Character-centric fantasy supers D&D is kind of odd in my view but not totally unappealing...I would give it a try. pemerton you've mentioned before that a major influence for your 4e game is Claremont's X-Men run -- I'm not big into comics so I didn't know what that meant but I brought it up with my friend who is and he said that's the source of most of the storylines used in the early 90's X-Men cartoon, which we both like a lot. We both agreed that those storylines were awesome but we also had a laugh because it's so different from our D&D games, where we don't go into how the PC's know and care about each other much at all
For me, X-Men is a model of a storyline where the personalities of a disparate group of high-powered heroes interact, on a regular basis, with one another and with the fate of the world. So it seems a reasonable model for "fantasy-supers" D&D!
I know it sounds deflationary to people who are very story-focused but the whole dungeon-crawling for blood, gold and gems thing makes more sense and is more appealing to me when the characters don't have much of an exterior motivation but are just roguish explorers/treasure hunters who do this because it's the only thing they know how to do.
Ron Edwards had
this description of the classic D&D PC (put forward in a discussion of fantasy heartbreakers), as well as some views about play problems that can come up - I know that some people find it pejorative, but I'm curious about what you think:
I think it's central to D&D fantasy that a character must start with a very high risk of dying and very little ability to change the world around him or her, and then increase in effectiveness, scope, and ability to sustain damage, all on a positive exponential fashion.
The concept seems to be that the player must serve his or her time as a schlub, greatly risking the character's existence, in order to enjoy the increased array and benefits of the powers, ability, and effectiveness that can only be accumulated through the reward-system. An enormous amount of the draw to play a particular game [he's commenting on a range of "fantasy heartbreakers"] seems to be based on explicitly laying out what the character might be able to do, later, if he or she lives. I want to distinguish this paradigm very sharply from the baseline "character improves through time" found in most role-playing games. This is something much, much more specific. . .
The key assumption throughout all these games is that . . . the most players can be relied upon to provide is kind of the "Id" of play - strategizing, killing, and conniving throughout the session. They are the raw energy, the driving "go," and the GM's role is to say, "You just scrap, strive, and kill, and I'll show ya, with this book, how it's all a brilliant evocative fantasy."
It's not Illusionism - there's no illusion at all, just movement across the landscape and the willingness to fight as the baseline player things to do. At worst, the players are apparently slathering kill-counters using simple alignment systems to set the bar for a given group . . . The Explorative, imaginative pleasure experienced by a player - and most importantly, communicated among players - simply doesn't factor into play at all, even in the more Simulationist Fantasy Heartbreakers, which are universally centered on Setting.
I think this is a serious problem for fantasy role-playing design. It's very, very hard to break out of D&D Fantasy assumptions for many people, and the first step, I think, is to generate the idea that protagonism (for any GNS mode) can mean more than energy and ego. These are fine things, of course, but it strikes me that playing with them as the sole elements provided by the players is a recipe for Social Contract breakdown.
I don't want to put words into your mouth, but I'm guessing from that you may not agree with the diagnosis of "a recipe for Social Contract breakdown". And I also think this might be linked to your board game idea, which presumably is all about downplaying the players imaginiative experience of the character in favour of the imaginative experience of the setting as narrated by the GM.
Explicit player responsibilities would allow us to say for example whether the game supports [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] in telling his DM to skip some part of the adventure or not.
I think looking at this list from BW he would be, because he's not just saying "I don't like this, come up with something else DM" he has a dramatic conflict in mind and wants to get to that.
I think that is right.
I'm looking at the 4e PHB and I think he would be out of line in this game:
"D&D is a cooperative game in which you and your friends work together to complete each adventure and have fun." p. 6
"The DM creates adventures (or selects premade adventures) for you and the other players to play through." p.8
(Emphasis mine).
What I get from this is that it's the players' job to try to complete the DM's adventure and they don't really have any business trying to shortcut parts of it.
<snip>
4e basically says that the player gets to make whatever character they feel like with no responsibility to do any pre-game dramatic coordination with the DM or other players, and roleplay them however they like, as long as they try to complete the adventure created by the DM (but it's OK if they fail, "even when your character is defeated, you don't "lose""p.6). Very light on responsibility, very low stakes.
I think on this stuff 4e is a bit incoherent (who'dda thunk it?), because as well as the stuff you point to there is other stuff as well:
On p 8, under the bit you quoted about the "DM as Adventure Builder", there is:
Narrator: The DM sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters the players must overcome.
Monster Controller: The Dungeon Master controls the monsters and villains the player characters battle against, choosing their actions and rolling dice for their attacks.
Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.
Now none of that would be out of line in BW, I think - so the key difference is "adventure builder". (In Esentials the 4th dot point was revised to read "The DM decides how to apply the game rules and guides the story. If the rules don't cover a situation, the DM determines what to do. At time, the DM might alter or even ignore the result of a die roll if doing so benefits the story." That would be completely out of place in BW, and in my view - except for the middle sentence - is not good advice for 4e either, which is designed to play well
without fudging.)
But on adventure building, in addition to page 8 we have p 258:
You can also, with your DM’s approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character’s background. . . Quests can also relate to individual goals, such as a ranger searching for a magic bow to wield. Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign’s unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story.
And the DMG tackles the same topic, on p 103:
You should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. Evaluate the proposed quest and assign it a level. Remember to say yes as often as possible!
That's not quite as forthright as Luke Crane, obviously, but I think it's meant to push in the same general direction. Which is away from GM as adventure-builder.
On pregame coordination of PCs, on the other hand, I agree with you. I think part of the point of the default history and cosmology is to try to achieve some approximation to that sort of coordination via the setting, but on its own that probably won't be very tight. And without that default, all bets are off.
I'm not the biggest fan of the sort of the sort of low-stakes high concept sim play that you're calling out as the default for 4e. And because I'm not the biggest fan maybe I'm not well placed to talk about good or bad systems for it - but I'll have a go anyway, and suggest that 4e is pretty heavy mechancially for that sort of game, and puts a lot of
mechanical responsibility on the player - just like BW says the player is responsible for invoking the mechanics, so 4e relies on the player to put powers to work, invoke p 42 etc. What is the point of that mechanical responsibility without the stakes to match it? Drifting in a slightly higher-stakes direction seems to fit better with the mechanical dimensions of 4e play (and the absence of such drift, and the expection of a low-responsibility GM-driven game, might help explain the "plays like a boardgame" experience).
Even if a chaos sorcerer wants to go wild, does that mean he wants to be challenged on it? "I want to cast magic spells" doesn't really do much to narrow down the campaign for the wizard's DM. Even the 4e PHB recommends you choose races for such profound dramatic reasons as "you want to play a guy who looks like a dragon." 
