First I'd like to point out that if diplomacy is as easy as fighting in the world context, it may not be as easy once you look at the much smaller population of characters in play. Character design tell you a lot about the player/PC values as well.
I agree with this, although different games make it easier or harder to express values via character build.
In Moldvay/Cook D&D there is little that can be done in this respect - choosing a Lawful cleric over a Neural thief says something, but is not very nuanced, especially if the game is played in the default approach of a treasure hunt through dungeons and wilderness.
Games like Rolemaster, 3E and 4e open this up quite a bit more. For example, if a player has the choice between Diplomacy and Intimidate as social skills, and chooses Intimidate, then - assuming that the player expects to have to resolve social situations in the game - that choice says something about what the player thinks is valuable.
Making the challenges similar despite player choices negates player decision in character design.
I'm not sure what you have in mind here. If a bear is a level X elite in combat, and if taming the bear is a level X complexity 2 skill challenge, then the XP award is the same across combat and non-combat approaches, and the pacing of the encounter is likely to be comparable whichever approach the players choose to have their PCs pursue. I don't think that this negates player decisions in character design, but maybe this isn't the sort of thing you had in mind.
I am intereested in both character study games and challenge games. But I choose the game system that best matches the genre, world, and game experience I want at the table for the game I'm going to run. I have a bunch of favourite systems for the types games I more often plan/run.
The various editions of D&D are reached for specifically for challenge play; I have much better systems for value play.
Whereas I don't think 4e (as written, including its encounter design system and XP and treasure rules) really suits challenge play - there is no obvious reward for the players, for example, in overcoming the challenges their PCs face(because, by the rules, treasure parcels accrue with XP and XP accrue, roughly, by real time played). LostSoul, in his 4e hack,
is running a challenge game, but he has had to make quite a few changes to the system to support this.
That's not to say that it's the world best values game - maybe it's not the best for anything! But I do enjoy it for a game where values are expressed by the way that the PCs engage with fantasy adventure challenges.
Are you conflating "challenge" with "combat scene"?
No. Certainly not intentionally, and nor do I think I am doing so inadvertantly.
It seems to me that the "values" oriented play still requires challenges, in the generic sense of a major difficulty the characters must overcome. What a character really values is only discovered when they are under stress, and have difficult choices to make. How does that not equate to being faced with a challenge?
They may be challenges for the PCs. But are they challenges for the players? In values play, as I am trying to characterise it, the interest is not in what the PC values, but what the
player values (which may or may not equate to what his/her PC values). And challenges to the PCs are interesting for providing opportunities for the players to express or reflect on those values.
Two examples from my game. First, after the party successfully tamed a bear which had attacked them (and which initially it seemed they would try and kill in response) the player of the paladin said "I feel really good about not having killed that bear". This was not primarily an in-character comment. It was an expression of the player's feelings.
Second, on an earlier occasion the PCs were fleeing a collapsing temple. Earlier, while exploring the temple and fighting the gnolls who were trying to dedicate it to Yeenoghu, the party had rescued/captured (it was a bit ambiguous) a devil-worshipping tiefling. The sorcerer in the party had wanted to ally with the tiefling (and his diabolic patron) in a temporary fashion, in order to get more power to fight the demon-worshippers. The wizard in the party had successfully opposed this suggestion. Now, as the party was fleeing the temple, the wizard took advantage of the confusion to slay the tiefling with a single magic missile. This caused shock around the table. The shock was, to some extent, in character shock. But it was also real shock - the other players were somewhat taken aback by the callousness the player of the wizard had displayed.
Values play, as I see it, is about creating lots of opportunities for the players to express their values, or respond to the choices of other players, in these sorts of ways. Yes, to do so the PCs need to be confronted with challenges (or conflicts) of various sorts. But the main aim of the game isn't for the players to overcome those challenges.
I don't think those two play-style are mutually exclusive. For example, Burning Wheel is explicitly about challenging beliefs, seeing how a person sticks to or abandons what they believe. That requires both values and challenges. The game is all about what you believe, but with challenging skills and combat being bloody and decisive, you're challenged mechanically as well.
I think this is right, and the crunchiness of 4e's combat rules in some ways resembles Burning Wheel. The Riddle of Steel would be another example of this sort of approach. But I tend to see that the crunchiness here is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Thought about another way, without mechanical challenge, values challenges don't matter much.
On the other hand, I don't think I agree with this. In 4e, for example, some skill challenges aren't especially challenging at the mechanical level - the optimal mechanical strategy may be fairly obvious, for example - but they can still raise significant values issues.
If I've misunderstood you, and what you meant to say was only that challenges that raise values issues should engage the mechanics of the game, then I come closer to agreement. Although sometimes even this isn't so - a situation which requires the player to choose between two commitments, for example, may raise a values question without necessarily engaging the mechanics of the game at that moment of choice. (Although you might want to say that even in this sort of case, if the mechanics are well-designed then the choice is likely to have mechanical consequences downstream.)
By way of warning for those adamantly opposed to anything emanating from The Forge, despite seeing its flaws and (to an extent) understanding your aversion, I do think that the crew there identified a lot of useful points about RPG play.
I agree.
In Forge terminology, what on this thread I am calling "challenge" play is "step on up" gamism with a very robust supporting layer of exploration - typically setting and/or situation exploration (depending in part on whether its a sandbox or an AP).
I certainly get the feel that, on ENworld, this is the widely-accepted default approach to RPGing. Discussions, for example, about scaling challenges, or adversarial GMing, or what counts as a meaningful choice as opposed to a railroad, tend to assume that this is how the game is being played.
(Not always, of course. I don't want to offend anyone by naming names, but I get the impression from The Shaman's posts that his game is a type of simulationist one, involving exploration of characters and setting. And I also tend to get the impression from Umbran's posts that he prefers a type of genre exploration in play - but that's more speculative.)
What I am calling "values" play is, in Forge terms, narrativism. In D&D 4e, as I play it, the narrativist agenda is supported by exploration of character and situation, with the setting as a backdrop providing (to borrow a phrase from Mercurius) "vibe and atmosphere".
I think the other main way the 4e could be played is as high concept (genre) simulation - but because (as has been frequently observed) 4e's mechanics don't always bring the fiction into the foreground if the GM and players aren't active in doing so, in my view playing 4e as an exploration game runs the risk of degenerating into "mere dice rolling".
For the reasons I already stated I don't think that 4e, as written, lends itself especially well to challenge play (not that it couldn't be tweaked, of course, as LostSoul has done).
