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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5744661" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's a crap approach. And I think most of the WotC modules I've seen for 4e are not very good. By "situation based, player driven game" I mean the general indie RPG approach: the players build PCs with hooks built into them; the GM, instead of building encounters that are intended to hook essentially story-less PCs, builds encounters that suit the hooks the players have built into their PCs; the players engage those encounters via their PCs; the fiction that results from that engagement then changes the PCs' hooks; new encounters are built by the GM around those new hooks; etc, etc. Eero Tuovinen calls this <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">"the standard narrativistic model"</a> of RPG play. Obviously 4e is not as hardcore in its narrativism as the serious indie RPGs, but equally obvious, I think, is the influence of those indie designs on 4e's approach to PC building, encounter building etc.The tools in 4e that facilitiate this sort of GMing are precisly the scaled DCs, the standard damage expressions, the monster guidelines, etc. These are what give everyone at the table the assurance that an unexpected choice by the players won't suddenly bring the game to a screaming, TPK-induced halt. (Or some lesser form of game-ending disaster.)</blockquote>