Indie Games Are Not More Focused. They Are Differently Focused.

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think that 4e D&D supports planning very well. Unlike classic D&D, there are no spell load outs. Even at low levels, mundane gear doesn't matter much (eg sunrods are very cheap). Skill challenge resolution depends on a certain degree of abstraction. And much of the action is in real-time decisions about resource expenditure.

4e is weird, because it tends to DISCOURAGE you from doing this (and of course you are correct that some arenas of planning like classic D&D spell load outs don't much exist). HOWEVER, gear could be pretty important, and there's a fairly tight encumbrance limit, oddly enough. So, you may well not be able to carry all you would like!
One time a few guys over on the old WotC boards wanted to do an online 4e and I joined them. So, I forget, we played on some VTT or other, but I decided to get a little crazy and I build my character as the ultimate 4e toolkit wizard. I just loaded up on stuff that would expand my options, give me the ability to create 'stuff', etc. So, I had the tome implement mastery, and the expanded spell book, and I bought rituals left and right, and alchemical formula, and picked the Apprentice Wizard theme, which gave me a couple more oddball things, etc. Even at first level, I remember the VERY FIRST THING we did was try to sneak up to some walled in place, and I found some oddball ritual that got us a huge bonus on our Stealth, and there we went, lol. It was like that every adventure. I swear, I'd figure out what the perfect stuff to have would be, plan it all out, and viola I would whip out the right potion, scroll, alchemical item, or ritual to make the whole plan work. It was like I was back in 1e. It drove everyone nuts because it was like LFQW, lol. I mean, most any PC could have done it, though wizards did have a few nicer options. Planning in an old-school sense might not have been EMPHASIZED, but if you paid attention, AV2 particularly was FILLED with some totally ridonculously effective consumables. Some of them are really outrageous.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah other than like, mental health stuff that I find satisfying to explore, I think only one of the last 10 characters I’ve played have been much like me in personality, and even here they aren’t wildly different, morality, they are still quite different.

I mean, I don’t enjoy punching someone, so my swashbuckler who loves a good fight in the same way that I used to enjoy running from cops or drunk rednecks I’d cheesed off at a bar and not realized they had a whole gaggle of friends is quite different from me, before we even get into important stuff. My Halfling Assassin is brooding, quiet, very dry in humor, and utterly externally passionless when angry. Not to mention capable of sitting still.


It is fun to play a character more like myself, too, though.

Now, see, for me to play a character, to RP it and inhabit it as a personality which is really different from mine, requires an INTELLECTUAL exercise. I'm sure that is just me, but it is not something where I am wanting lack of restrictions or process in order to do it. The opposite, I want stuff ON MY CHARACTER SHEET and have it bind me to play the Utterly Selfish Egotist, or the Overly Sensitive Intellectual, or whatever whatever whatever. If I don't consciously work out and implement my character's personality, I guarantee you I will start to just get into baseline hardcore gamer PC mode, every time.

D&D's way of relating the participants at the table and to the characters and the story, will INVARIABLY do that. I will be playing 'Questioner of All Things', mastermind, plans and controls everything, has a personality, but definitely always WINS. That character can be any class, whatever, it won't matter.

 

[pemerton]

@AbdulAlhazred, I'm guessing that in the game you describe those out-of-combat elements (eg sneaking into walled places) wasn't being resolved via skill challenges. Am I right?

 

[Aldarc]

I'll be real with you? I've yet to have had a narrative experience that matches our 4e game. The implicit insistence is that the stories produced by traditional games, particularly in @Campbell's recent post, don't support Bleed as well... hasn't been my experience, its actually been pretty hard for me to bleed in these other games, and a big part of why is that the mechanics are so ever present my brain keeps analyzing them instead of slipping into the fiction. If as Edwards once suggested, the mechanics are a 'prosthetic' for our damaged ability to tell stories (which I'm still not crazy about, but its a useful analogy here) its like trying to use the 'prosthetic' on top of a fully functioning limb-- especially since I come from a freeform play by post background, often 'playing to find out what happens' using the mechanics is taking the story in directions that are less interesting to me, the authorship is part of the fun.

Thats why traditional games are a lot more intuitive to me I guess, they compartmentalize mechanics differently.

4e is likely a bit of a different fish from the rest of D&D and traditional play. I suspect that it's one reason a lot of the Story Now people on this forum are commonly singing its praises, while a fair number of posters more steeped in traditional play seem to eschew it and also complain about its mechanics in a similar way as you do here. On a recent Twitch stream, Matt Colville basically argued that 4e D&D may have been the only edition of D&D - and I suspect that he was overlooking B/X and procedural dungeon-crawling here - that was intentionally designed to be good at a particular style of play: i.e., high heroic. He also compared it to Exalted, which I found interesting given @Campbell's own experiences with both. So in some regards, D&D 4e does have more in common with "indie games."

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

4e is likely a bit of a different fish from the rest of D&D and traditional play. I suspect that it's one reason a lot of the Story Now people on this forum are commonly singing its praises, while a fair number of posters more steeped in traditional play seem to eschew it and also complain about its mechanics in a similar way as you do here. On a recent Twitch stream, Matt Colville basically argued that 4e D&D may have been the only edition of D&D - and I suspect that he was overlooking B/X and procedural dungeon-crawling here - that was intentionally designed to be good at a particular style of play: i.e., high heroic. He also compared it to Exalted, which I found interesting given @Campbell's own experiences with both. So in some regards, D&D 4e does have more in common with "indie games."

I'd agree, with the caveat that 4e seemed to succeed most for me (as fun as the tactical combat it was designed for was) in having a light touch outside of combat.

We had scenes with a lot of what Campbell discusses as bleed, with only the base conflict resolution mechanic to sort out details. So while it was absolutely designed with a degree of real precision, it was also not in the area where my ecperience really shines.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Now, see, for me to play a character, to RP it and inhabit it as a personality which is really different from mine, requires an INTELLECTUAL exercise. I'm sure that is just me, but it is not something where I am wanting lack of restrictions or process in order to do it. The opposite, I want stuff ON MY CHARACTER SHEET and have it bind me to play the Utterly Selfish Egotist, or the Overly Sensitive Intellectual, or whatever whatever whatever. If I don't consciously work out and implement my character's personality, I guarantee you I will start to just get into baseline hardcore gamer PC mode, every time.

D&D's way of relating the participants at the table and to the characters and the story, will INVARIABLY do that. I will be playing 'Questioner of All Things', mastermind, plans and controls everything, has a personality, but definitely always WINS. That character can be any class, whatever, it won't matter.

Ah, fair enough. For me, the personality traits, and some internal “rules” do the trick, but I can totally see where a lack of spefkcic features rest.

 

[Campbell]

It's not about the stories produced. It's about the process of play. What's socially freeing about most Story Now games to me is that they are structured in a way where I just get to play a protagonist. I don't have to worry about some adventure or story to follow. I don't have to worry about stepping on toes, spotlight balance, or character arcs. The game is socially setup in a way where I'm just responsible for advocating for my character.

I'm a former soldier, theater kid, and lifelong athlete so I am naturally biased towards being a team player and collaborator. If there is a social implication that something is important to the group (of players) like overcoming a mission, maintaining cohesion among the PCs, or maintaining their concepts I feel constantly torn about what I'm supposed to be doing and feel like I can never really get into the right headspace to experience bleed in. It's incredibly stressful to me (if I actively try to fight the game).

Some traditional games are better than others here. RuneQuest, Exalted Third Edition, Legend of the Five Rings 5e, Chronicles of Darkness, and to a lesser extent Pathfinder Second Edition / D&D 4e were much better than other traditional games here. Infinity also seems better, but I have not really played it long enough to know. Mostly the more a game is weighted towards playing a person who exists with ties to things outside themselves the better.

As far as mechanics, particularly social mechanics, with teeth I think where they help the most is in providing social permission to act in ways our gamer culture generally considers selfish in the context of traditional play. Stuff like going off on your own, pursuing personal desires over group ones, acting out, having a contentious relationship with other PCs, etc. This is a really big deal for me personally.

The other thing I think they do really well is slowly over time help get players in a mindset of being a curious explorer of the fiction, including their own character. In my personal experience we all have the tendency to hold way to tightly to our conceptions of who these characters are, their personalities, what they want out of life, and what they are willing to do to get it. Social mechanics with teeth help to promote really thinking about these things in more depth and really considering what a character would do instead of getting attached to ideas about how things should play out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred, I'm guessing that in the game you describe those out-of-combat elements (eg sneaking into walled places) wasn't being resolved via skill challenges. Am I right?

Well, I don't recall that the GM in that game was quite where I am now in my thinking where I would not run any conflict outside of an SC in 4e. I mean, this game WAS 9 years ago or so, even I wasn't quite at that stage in my thinking back then.

So, 4e really never tried to build any standardized process for things like "I'm in an SC, I want to cast a ritual that will accomplish the next bit of the fiction." In general, since checks were pretty ubiquitous in most areas of play, you could simply take whatever check was specific to the thing you wanted to do (attack roll, ritual check, etc.) and simply apply it to the SC. The question then was always "why did I burn this ritual instead of someone making some other check?" Obviously the GM could deal with that, but it created a 'hole' into which GM 'rulings' had to apply. Still, if you were following Story Game type principles and paying attention to 4e's statements about process, it would work.

So, my specific answer is 'no' I don't think they were mostly SCs. Certainly with the right GM they COULD be. With a '4e 2.0' cleaned up design, such a thing would be pretty viable IMHO. It certainly worked for me in that game, though we didn't progress beyond heroic play. I'm not sure if all those elements would serve as well in Epic. I'm guessing I could have managed it fairly well.

 

[kenada]

As far as mechanics, particularly social mechanics, with teeth I think where they help the most is in providing social permission to act in ways our gamer culture generally considers selfish in the context of traditional play. Stuff like going off on your own, pursuing personal desires over group ones, acting out, having a contentious relationship with other PCs, etc. This is a really big deal for me personally.

This is something I’ve been wanting to say but could not figure out how to put it. I had a reputation in our D&D games for playing “stupid” characters because they would get into trouble and die sometimes. I guess I just didn’t care all that much about winning so much as being entertained (though my monk in 3e was more about being not-incompetent at something for once). Sometimes they would make bad decisions, but those bad decisions would make made sense for the character. I lost a few characters that way, and I’m pretty sure I ruined at least one Mage campaign. While I miss planning out our missions in Scum and Villainy, I love that I can drive a character hard without having to worry that I’m doing something wrong or “stupid” because that’s the point.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I find it super hard to make characters 'act dumb' unless I have a real structured way to do it, lol.