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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5648574" data-attributes="member: 42582">For AD&D - the last few pages of Gygax's PHB, which talk about how to play as a "skilled player". Don't these show that the game (as written, or at least as intended by Gygax to be played) is about successful dungeon exploration and looting?For 4e, it starts with the discussion in the DMG on quests - how a GM designs quests, the importance of player-initiated quests, etc. Here're some sample passages, from pages 102-3:Quests are the fundamental story framework of an adventure - the reason the characters want to participate in it. They’re the reason an adventure exists, and they indicate what the characters need to do to solve the situation the adventure presents. . . Quests should focus on the story reasons for adventuring, not on the underlying basic actions of the game - killing monsters and acquiring treasure. "Defeat ten encounters of your level" isn’t a quest. It's a recipe for advancing a level. Completing it is its own reward. "Make Harrows Pass safe for travelers" is a quest, even if the easiest way to accomplish it happens to be defeating ten encounters of the characters' level. This quest is a story-based goal, and one that has at least the possibility of solution by other means.I'll agree that that's not quite Burning Wheel, but I see 4e as a little "abashed" in its presentation of what the designers' seem to have had in mind.This on page 103 of the DMG helps build up the picture, though: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!And I think the intention is further suggested by this, from page 258 of the PHB:Most adventures have a goal, something you have to do to complete the adventure successfully. The goal might be a personal one, a cause shared by you and your allies, or a task you have been hired to perform. A goal in an adventure is called a quest. Quests connect a series of encounters into a meaningful story. . . You can also, with your DM's approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character's background. . . Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign's unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story. When you complete quests, you earn rewards, including experience points, treasure, and possibly other kinds of rewards.The DMG, on page 122, suggests what these other kinds of rewards might be:[Q]uests can also have less concrete rewards. Perhaps someone owes them a favor, they’ve earned the respect of an organization that might give them future quests, or they’ve established a contact who can provide them with important information or access.There is also this, on pages 18 and 24 of the PHB:The Dungeons & Dragons game is, first and foremost, a roleplaying game, which means that it’s all about taking on the role of a character in the game. . . Your character’s background often stays there - in the background. What’s most important about your character is what you do in the course of your adventures, not what happened to you in the past. Even so, thinking about your birthplace, family, and upbringing can help you decide how to play your character.How this stuff about character design is meant to fit into the stuff on quests isn't made entirely clear - again, we're not looking at Burning Wheel here - but the picture I get is that the designers envisage PCs who have a place in the fiction - of which backstory is an element but not the most important element - and that the players and GM work together to conceive of quests (ie adventures) that build on and develop this place in the fiction. (That is what the "other kinds of rewards" seem to be about.)Combat is a means to this end - part of the "recipe for advancing a level" - but isn't what the game is presented as being about, at least in these passages.Now, the many words that have been exchanged in relation to 4e over the past few years have left me with the sense that there are two main responses to this text in the 4e rulebooks. One response is mine - to take it at face value, to see it as an attempt to gesture at the sort of play that games like Burning Wheel spell out much more explicitly (and have extra bells and whistles to facilitate). This response requires, at a minimum, reading 4e as its own game, and not through the prism of past editions (which aimed at different approaches to play - this is particularly evident for Gygaxian AD&D). The other response, which I have seen a lot on these boards, is to more-or-less discount this rules text, and to point instead to the rules for combat, the rules for maps and tokens/miniatures, etc, and also to the modules (which do not at all implement this advice on scenario and character design, any more than they generally implement the advice on tactical encounter design), as showing what the game is really about.I think it is a reason in favour of my reading that it interprets and presents the game as a strong, functional, modern RPG, which is admittedly not well-suited to Gygaxian play, but is nevertheless pretty well suited to a widely-recognised and well-known approach to RPGing. Whereas the other reading presents the game as a tactical skirmish game passing itself off as an RPG. (And 4e, with its many non-simulationist mechanics, is particularly vulnerable to being presented and played this way, because its lack of simulationism makes it much easier to drift its action resolution in a direction where the fiction doesn't matter.)I think that's the best I can do at showing anyone the light!</blockquote>

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