AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, in all fairness DW isn't vague about what it in general expects the DM to do, and that's great. OTOH there are NO rules really saying what happens next. The DM is perfectly within his rights to just say "and the monster smacks you for N damage." There would PROBABLY be a 'Defy Danger' in there, at least the player might hope to be able to jump in and suggest a course of action that would yield one, but there is absolutely no rule that says any such thing will happen. In fact this sort of thing is pretty much intended to be decided by the DM's story needs (IE he can dish out more damage, directly or indirectly, based on how much tension he wants to create, etc). In fact there's very little that is concrete in DW. Monsters have a hit point number and a damage number, and some VERY generalized moves, potentially, but a DM can trivially make an orc anything from a dire threat to a tiny speed bump without straying even close to going outside the rules or guidelines.
I think this is great, for what DW is, I'm not criticizing it at all, but its VERY loose, and loose in a way that begs constant reinterpretation. DMs IME have to be very careful to maintain consistency, do a lot of foreshadowing and exposition, etc. I find that a lot of players are a bit lost in this kind of game.
Yes, 4e and DW are very different games, hence my question/rumination about how you would capture elements of both games in one system (and what things you couldn't capture effectively in a game that borrowed from both). OTOH the way I ran 4e leaned pretty heavily into the narrative story directed kind of play. Clearly 4e has rules which pin down the narrative details a lot more than DW. Its not clear to me how you marry the "tell me what happened" aspect of DW with the rules-driven result and specified player options structure of 4e. I think it would be an interesting exercise and something cool might come out of such efforts, at least in the hands of someone talented (IE probably not me).
Classic D&D has a huge amount of vagueness. Part of what I found unsatisfying about it is that it is both vague and subject to heavy DM whim in terms of the details of things, and at the same time has too much structure to easily lend itself to a DW-like style of play. Now, if you go all the way back to the original 1974 game things are SO vague that you end up with a game that could be played a LOT like DW, though if you were doing that you might want to go whole hog and toss out the combat system and use a narrative structuring ala DW's. 1e was just ANNOYING, it seemed like it sat in the sore spot between too many constraints and not enough clear rules definition. Much of what appealed to many about 4e was that it clearly moved out of that spot.
Yeah, lot's of people are porting stuff from 4E to 13th Age. Right now I'm enjoying the 13th age Core Book content, but I believe I'll soon want to make my own stuff, and it seems pretty portable. Hopefully we'll see a conversion document soon.
I think it's good for everyone that D&D Next is trying to be it's own thing, but a contingency plan has to be in place in case I dislike it, hahah
I just was annoyed by 13a. I think they had interesting ideas with the RP side of it, but IMHO the mechanics are really not that great. Why go from a really flexible core power system that lets you combine elements of virtually ANY 2 classes in new and interesting ways to one that has simply a ton of arbitrarily slightly different power systems (often with 2 or even 3 different ones on the same class)? I couldn't find any real advantage to that. Its just too much of "lets do it different than 4e for the sake of changing things" vs any fathomable reason for the changes.
Combat is a little bit different story, they at least were aiming for something that played differently there, not just "its not 4e", though it sometimes felt that way.
I had some fun playing 13a, but it felt like in my case it didn't do a lot of things a whole lot better than 4e does, and there are a bunch of things it seemed to do worse. PERSONALLY I'd rather make 4e my starting point. I WOULD do some of the things they did in Next in terms of streamlining things (and 13a did some similar things), but rather than kill tactical combat like both of those games did I'd make it faster and more exciting and more clearly link the character's combat abilities to their story and history. I think its doable, the question here is if there's anyone who's going to really do it.
