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<blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8974690" data-attributes="member: 6670763"><p>To stretch out a metaphor excessively far, if we want the players to do any lifting, the game should provide plenty of easy to see handles to grab on to. Being proactive shouldn't require special skills or exceptional creativity.</p><p></p><p>The classic dungeon crawling style of old D&D is very good at that. The game rules lay it out clearly that progress in the form of character advancement is made by finding treasures. So players easily understand that what they are supposed to do is to go searching for treasures. And the fiction of the setting lets them know how to reliably begin that search: Find the locations of dungeons. That's where treasure will be found. And if the GM did a halfway decent job, learning about more dungeons is easy. Just ask the relevant people: Sages, mayors, priests, innkeepers, and so on.</p><p>The choices to be made here for the players are very simple ones: "Who should we ask for clues about dungeons?" "Which of the dungeons we know about should we go to?" Give them a few more hints like the dungeons being "the haunted crypts", "the caves in the spider woods", and "the bandit lair somewhere on the mountain pass", and the choice which place they want to go to starts to become significant, as it will determine what strategies they will plan for and what kind of supplies they want to bring.</p><p>Even when the players think they could just flip a coin when making these initial choices because of how little information they have to go with, they will later understand that everything that's happening to them would not have happened if they made a different choice earlier. I find this to be a very significant part of the experience of playing a player-driven campaign.</p><p></p><p>Forged in the Dark games have their own way of providing structures by making their adventures jobs that the players will set the basic parameters for before they head out. Rob this place, steal that thing. In Blades in the Dark, these jobs serve to give the players progress points which they can use to extend their control over the city's underworld with the goal to become its criminal lords. Scum and Villainy and The Sprawl lack this campaign progress, which I think means there are fewer handles for the players to hold on for pursuing a long term goal.</p><p></p><p>When you have infinite options and unlimited choices, it's really hard to take charge of the story because there are too many possible decisions that could be made. Games always benefit from having some kind of structure that reduces decisions from coming up with one of infinite many things to choosing between a limited set of options.</p><p></p><p>Now this is of course something that is quite specific to the style of the fiction of individual campaigns. Old D&D and Blades in the Dark are both very limited in what kind of adventures they mean to offer. Treasure hunting in dungeons and comitting crimes to become the crime lords of a city.</p><p>I guess to provide meaningful structures for the players to work with, the overall style of the campaign's fiction has to be established first.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Yora, post: 8974690, member: 6670763"] To stretch out a metaphor excessively far, if we want the players to do any lifting, the game should provide plenty of easy to see handles to grab on to. Being proactive shouldn't require special skills or exceptional creativity. The classic dungeon crawling style of old D&D is very good at that. The game rules lay it out clearly that progress in the form of character advancement is made by finding treasures. So players easily understand that what they are supposed to do is to go searching for treasures. And the fiction of the setting lets them know how to reliably begin that search: Find the locations of dungeons. That's where treasure will be found. And if the GM did a halfway decent job, learning about more dungeons is easy. Just ask the relevant people: Sages, mayors, priests, innkeepers, and so on. The choices to be made here for the players are very simple ones: "Who should we ask for clues about dungeons?" "Which of the dungeons we know about should we go to?" Give them a few more hints like the dungeons being "the haunted crypts", "the caves in the spider woods", and "the bandit lair somewhere on the mountain pass", and the choice which place they want to go to starts to become significant, as it will determine what strategies they will plan for and what kind of supplies they want to bring. Even when the players think they could just flip a coin when making these initial choices because of how little information they have to go with, they will later understand that everything that's happening to them would not have happened if they made a different choice earlier. I find this to be a very significant part of the experience of playing a player-driven campaign. Forged in the Dark games have their own way of providing structures by making their adventures jobs that the players will set the basic parameters for before they head out. Rob this place, steal that thing. In Blades in the Dark, these jobs serve to give the players progress points which they can use to extend their control over the city's underworld with the goal to become its criminal lords. Scum and Villainy and The Sprawl lack this campaign progress, which I think means there are fewer handles for the players to hold on for pursuing a long term goal. When you have infinite options and unlimited choices, it's really hard to take charge of the story because there are too many possible decisions that could be made. Games always benefit from having some kind of structure that reduces decisions from coming up with one of infinite many things to choosing between a limited set of options. Now this is of course something that is quite specific to the style of the fiction of individual campaigns. Old D&D and Blades in the Dark are both very limited in what kind of adventures they mean to offer. Treasure hunting in dungeons and comitting crimes to become the crime lords of a city. I guess to provide meaningful structures for the players to work with, the overall style of the campaign's fiction has to be established first. [/QUOTE]
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