Contrary to what's being said in this thread, there were plenty of other comments and previews in the period leading up to release (see for instance
this index on the WotC site). And to me, at least, they made it clear that the game aimed to
use the mechanics in classic indie fashion - rather than ignoring the dice to tell a story (which is the classic 2nd ed AD&D/White Wolf "golden rule" approach), the game was being designed so that
using the mechanics would produce classic D&D stories. This was what Worlds & Monsters spoke about, and what those previews spoke about too.
And Rob Heinsoo himself, in a pre-release interview, made the
comparison to indie games:
There might not be anyone else out there who would publish this kind of game. They usually get entrenched in the simulation aspect.
Indie games are similar in that they emphasize the gameplay aspect, but they’re super-focused, like a narrow laser. D&D has to be more general to accommodate a wide range of play.
That interview was given on March 5 2008. Between it, and Worlds & Monsters (I didn't look much at Races & Classes which seems a lot less interesting), plus the previews on their website, I wasn't surprised at all by how 4e turned out - except that it was even better than I had hoped!
I think you're understating this a bit. ☺To me, this is one of the great tragedies of the whole 4e saga. The first set of books give very little cogent advice or direction on how to effectively use the mechanics beyond setting up AWESOME! encounters. I personally didn't even see it as all that much of a mechanical evolution and totally whiffed on running it "indie" style. I was out of 4e before DMG2 even came out (why buy if no one is playing it?). And Fate is my system of choice! So you'd think I'd be catching that. When I came here after the 5e announcement, I was flabbergasted by the way folks like you and @
pemerton described your games. (Still am, to some extent.)
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
):
- Noncombat conflict resolution such as several games from Dogs to Sorcerer (with narrative and mechanical fallout) designed to create dramatic outcomes. They didn't unify it with the entirety of the system because D&D has to have crunchy combat.
- Subjective DCs for the conflict resolution that are tied to stakes and creating dramatic outcomes rather than objective DCs tied to an attempt to (incoherently as they virtually always do) simulate fantasy world physics.
- Extremely Broad Skills to facilitate broad base competency to facilitate the dramatic impetus inherent to the conflict resolution system. They intentionally eschewed narrowly-defined and tightly coupled, pseue-process-sim skills, and their rigid application, as in 3.x.
- Themes, backgrounds, and a formalized quest XP system (that the player is expected to be involved in - elaborated on in DMG2 and NWCS for the Themes especially) that does much of the work in propelling play. This stuff is peripherally related to BW and Mouseguard Beliefs and are embedded in lots of Indie systems. Mouseguards Goals and Dungeon World's xp for resolved bonds and alignment statements is pretty much exactly the same as these are basically player-driven minor quests. They're meant to be a primary driver of play. I know you've compared the latter to the bolted on, solely GM side quest stuff in AD&D2e but I just don't see it in either the advice or the execution.
- Scene based mechanics that refresh on a scene by scene basis which have that metagame impetus to them (to push play toward the scene) and a narrative trigger for the refresh (short rest). You see this in games like Dogs and The Shadow of Yesterday. I know they're called Encounter Powers rather than "Scene". I'm pretty sure this can be tied directly to Heinsoo's statement above. They had to be bold, and were, but they also had to defer now and again. It may seem that they arbitrarily agitated the "This doesn't feel like D&D (!)" base, and they may have. There may be no rhyme or reason why they slaughtered certain sacred cows but did others. I don't really know. However, I can easily intuit that if they subbed Scene for Encounter, the feather ruffling would have been immense.
- Healing Surges are pretty much open descriptor.
- Keywords you see in games like Heroquest and Dungeon World. They have both their metagame aspect but they are meant to be tools that lead the fiction.
- Action Points are obviously a narrative device that have their roots in several systems.
- A powers system that provides every PC (not just spellcasters) with packaged, discrete fiat power that are typically deployed outside of actor stance.
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).
Pemerton's quote below is central to the point of indie design and this was absolutely core to 4e (if nothing else) which intentionally pushed play out of the hands of GM rulings and GM fiat and into conflict-charge scenes framed (primarily - there is guidance in the DMG2 for player-authored bangs) and action resolution determining the propulsion of story:
I think those who were shocked, upon release, perhaps hadn't really taken the designers at their word, or hadn't fully appreciated that they really were setting out to build an RPG where using the action resolution mechanics is not some sort of supplement to playing the game, but is playing the game.
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. I wish themes were released before Dark Sun and then NCS's great instruction and centralizing of them to play, but they weren't. All I know is that in now way did I or do I feel like I've drifted the system from its default intent of the proper usage and interpretation of its system components and from several GMing principles (which include the D&D derivative of Vincent Baker's "every moment drive play towards conflict" not conflict-neutral setting exploration - eg - "skip the guards and get to the fun"). I feel like Heinsoo knew exactly what he was creating but they waffled a bit and intentionally put means in the system so that elements of classic D&D attrition/exploratory play were available (if you knew the elements you should be using as they differed in certain ways from prior D&D).
I don't know what kind of failure it is (writing, editing, design, marketing...), but honestly (between the DMG2 and various articles online) I sometimes feel like WotC didn't know what they had or how to play it when they released 4e.
Water under the bridge, now, I guess.
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.
I think that Rob Heinsoo understood it - and left early. I'm absolutely sure that Mike Mearls did not - and it was only presented in places even if it's how I've always run the game (to the point of my almost incomprehension that others didn't see @
pemerton 's style as normal).
100 % agree.
