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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6099987" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION],  [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], and maybe some other posters I'm missing, have all drawn attention to one significant difference between BW and classic D&D.In BW, you can't advance your PC abilities (stats, skills and the like) without confronting a variety of challenges at a range of difficulties, some (perhaps many) of which you will fail. So players have a strong mechanical incentive - via these advancement rules - to put their PCs into losing situations.In play, this is mitigated in a couple of ways.First, there is "fail forward". So players in BW can afford to have their PCs lose. Traditionally in D&D the penalty for failure is PC death. That is a huge difference. The only edition of D&D to really go out of its way to suggest something different from this is 4e, which in various places (eg skill challenge guidelines, its "say yes" advice) advocates "fail forward"; and which has clear rules that 0 hp need not equal death.Second, there are the "fate point" (in BW terminology, "artha") rules. Certain ingame choices, including many of those which might lead to failure, earn fate points and the like. Which means even when a player's PC is losing, the player is still deriving mecahanical benefits. And (as Crazy Jerome pointed out) those fate points can be spent to turn some of the likely failures into successes, which means that the player has at least a modicum of control over how the really key situations play out. The closest analogues to these mechanics I'm familiar with from any version of D&D are, again, in 4e: players can (per Essentials) earn Skill Challenge XP even if they fail the challenge, and you could also envisage player-designed Quests where the player gets Quest XP even if the player doesn't succeed at every encounter; and players earn action points, plus magic item unlocks (daily usages, certain items with milestone triggers, etc) for undertaking more encounters between rests.This relationship, in BW, between PC failure and mechanical rewards for players (advancement, fate points) also feeds into the game in at least a couple of other ways.First, it helps give the game a type of crisis-ridden or potentially pathos-ridden air: because of the Fate Points on offer, players have an incentive to hurl their PCs hopelessly at the things their PCs care about, or that are related to their PCs, rather than at any random losing cause. Which means the dramatic stakes of those situations where the PCs are clearly outmatched are likely to be high.No version of D&D that I'm aware of has this feature (though 4e might come closest, if player designed Quests loom large at a particular table). For instance, the milestone rules give the players an incentive to press on, but it's not linked in any mechancal fashion to player-set dramatic stakes. This is one thing I have in mind when I talk about 4e as supporting vanilla narrativist play - there are no mechanics that will automatically engender this sort of dramatic cycle, the game instead relying on the GM to do it him-/herself in framing scenes.A second important consequence of the role of failure in BW is that, because players have a mechanical incentive not to always confront mechanically easy challenges (because if they do, their PCs won't advance), so they have an incentive not to always use all the bonuses that might be available in a given situation. This means that you can have rich and flavourful augment rules (in BW terminology, "helping" and "ForRKs = Fields of Related Knowledge") without worrying that they will break under the strain; because players won't always want to use them.A related consequence is that BW's system of "objective" DCs isn't always subjected to maximum pressure, because it's not always in the players' interests for DCs to be as low as possible. (Because high DCs help advancement).A further related consequence, pointed out explicitly in the Adventure Burner, is that it's not always a bad thing to get wounded, because wound penalties increase the difficulty of challenges and therefore open up adavancement opportunities.These all take pressure off the GM and the role of GM adjudication in important ways: the augment rules are somewhat self-regulating; the DC-setting rules are also somewhat self-regulating; having your PC wounded is good as well as bad, and hence there is no sense that the GM, in wounding your PC, is just hosing you.These are elegant design features. No version of D&D has anything like them that I can think of. 4e's approach to managing DCs is to go for scaled rather than objective DCs. Its approach to wounds is to go for scaled damage in a hit point system, and a complex system of conditions and condition removal, rather than wound penalties. And it has no very good system for augments at all (as can be seen in various iterations of the skill challenge rules).Anyway, these are all things one would have to think about if trying to play D&D in a more BW-ish style.</blockquote>

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