Shout out to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], since I'm going to pick this up here. I took some time to reread sections of my PHB1 and DMG1. Also, for any other readers out there, I'm not sure how much I'd count this problem as part of the "Cliff Notes" summary of the 4e experience, since I'm not sure how common a problem it was. Hopefully I won't take so much time composing this post that its passé by the time it hits.
I'd never seen those lead-up statements by Heinsoo so thank you very much for posting them pemerton. That is as insightful a glance into the mental framework for Heinsoo's D&D as you will find. That has been my exact surmise all these years. They intentionally embedded driftability/wobbliness because D&D has to be more general. Nonetheless, the indie influence in design and GMing principles are there (and I know we've been through this several times @
Ratskinner so I apoligize for redredging...but hey, why not
):
Meh. That's what forums are for innit? Although let's stick a pin in driftability for a minute.
I know that you feel that the premise and the supporting evidence isn't there. Same for @
Nagol . I don't know. Maybe its because you guys are comparing it to Fate and its Fate Point Economy (or MHRP/Savage Worlds plot/bennie economies). Those economies and system interactions aren't specifically there but perhaps poor man derivatives in another fashion (but there is a healing surge economy that manifests in certain ways - spend a healing surge for a success in an SC or for Rituals/MPs - this could have been central but they didn't go that route). Those economies are certainly major parts of some games whose function is to propel narrative. However, those aren't the only devices out there for it. Several (the majority) "Story Now" indie games don't possess them (or at least not in the same form).
Having just reread the relevant DMG sections....I think its just that its far to subtle, even timid about it. In fact, most of its in little sidebars or tiny paragraphs that seem like afterthoughts to large tracts that seem like very 3e-ish notes about numbers, etc. Even the SC/HS notes seems to fall more along the lines of "Sim" rather than "Story Now", with examples focusing on exhaustion from travel or similar. I don't see anything about spending a Healing Surge for success
intentionally. If Healing Surges are intended to be an "economy" for Story Now purposes rather than a sim-ish reflection of Character Condition, I see no evidence of it in the text of the DMG1.
Also, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], recall that I wasn't following the website/updates very much. I was pretty casual about the advent of 4e. (Having heard it was like some combo of Bo9S and SWSE, both of which I liked, I didn't figure it would actually be a big deal.) I would never have seen those talks and the like. I don't think that following development blogs and the like should be necessary to understand how a game should be run. (My group was also one of those that experienced the disaster of the first-run skill challenge math, so I'm sure that didn't help.) Of course, if they intended it to be so driftable, maybe there
wasn't a way it "should be" run.
Perhaps as a consequence of wanting to make it "driftable", they toned it down too much. I wasn't looking for an "indie" game out of D&D (having been profoundly disappointed before), and nothing in the reading of the rules in the first set of books dissuaded me that this wasn't a slightly fancier, more-codified 3e-ish system. (Although things like DC treadmills impressed me as stupid right out of the gate, I saw them as a legacy issue.) That is, yes, I can see now how it can be run that way, but I still don't get the impression that that was the intention from the writing of DMG1. (maybe James Wyatt was a WotC staffer that didn't get it?
)
I do certainly recognize that "economies" are not the only way to do StoryNow, but honestly I don't get how most of those other points line up as "Indie". I mean, Healing Surges are no more "open descriptor" than HP before them. Quest XPs are certainly not intended to be the primary (sometimes only) source of advancement as are similar mechanics in other games. The scene based mechanics I'll give you, but that was pretty old hat by the 2008.
I wish that DMG2 (which was released inside a year of the system's release) would have been the initial DMG (with several other bits of fantastic advice in DMG1), but it wasn't. <snippage>
Indeed water under the bridge. I think it was some of the things you mentioned and intentional incoherency/system drift due to what Heinsoo outlines above. And I absolutely agree that several people under Heinsoo didn't know what they had. You look at the early adventures by Mearls et al and they are a cluster. They should have been presented as Dungeon World's Fronts. Instead you get this godawful dungeon delving format and this impossible formalizing of abstract conflict resolution. I would never try to formalize abstract conflict resolution but there are tons of people on this very board who have done a thousand times better job at it than those awful initial goes by the very folks who were supposed to have the best handle on things.
It seems to me that that's what these discussion always come down to, and I think its instructive and evidence for what I'm talking about. Other than you (and some other around here) "got it" when 4e first came out, and I failed my Secret Decoder Ring check, I actually don't think we disagree much about it.