What Is an Experience Point Worth?

It seems like a simple question, but the way you answer it may, in effect, determine the metaphysics of your game. Many RPGs use some sort of "experience point" system to model growth and learning. The progenitor of this idea is, of course, Dungeons & Dragons; the Experience Point (XP) system has been a core feature of the game from the beginning.

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Yet what exactly an experience point is remains unclear.

Think about it: can anyone earn an XP under the right circumstances? Or must one possess a class? If so, what qualifies an individual for a class? The 1st-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide specifies that henchmen earn 50 percent of the group’s XP award. In other words, they get a full share awarded, but then only "collect" half the share. Where does the other half go? Did it ever exist in the first place?

These esoteric questions were highlighted for me recently when I recreated a 20-year-old D&D character from memory for a new campaign I’m playing in. All I could remember of this character from my high school days was her race and class (half-elf Bladesinger, because I liked the cheese, apparently) and that the campaign fizzled out after only a handful of sessions. If I made it to level 2 back then, I couldn’t rightly say.

I asked my Dungeon Master (DM)—the same fellow who had run the original game for me back in the days of the Clinton administration—whether I could start a level ahead, or at least with a randomly-determined amount of XP (say, 200+2D100). Being the stern taskmaster that he is, he shot down both suggestions, saying instead that I’d be starting at 0 XP and at level 1, just like the rest of the party. As justification, he said that my character had amassed 0 XP for this campaign.

As the character probably only had a few hundred XP to her name to begin with, I let the matter slide. But it did get me thinking: do Experience Points only exist within the context of individual campaigns? Was my DM onto something?

This sort of thinking can in turn lead down quite a rabbit hole. Are classes themselves an arbitrary construct? Do they exist solely for players, or are non-player characters (NPCs) also capable of possessing classes and levels? Different editions of D&D have presented different interpretations of this question, from essentially statting up all NPCs as monsters, with their own boutique abilities (as in the earliest iterations of the game), to granting NPCs levels in "non-adventuring classes" (the famous 20th-level Commoner of 3rd-edition days).

The current edition of D&D has come back around to limiting classes and XP awards to player-characters only—which brings us back to our original question: are Experience Points, like character classes, meant to function solely as an abstract game mechanic, or are they an objective force within the game world? How do you, the reader at home, treat XP in your campaigns?

contributed by David Larkins

 

[Lanefan]

Just to pick up on this (not to contradict it, but to point out that it's actually quite an understatement):

Gygax's DMG (1979), p 90 (under the heading "Territory Development by Player Characters":

Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town, choosing an area of wooded hills as the general site. He then asks you if there is a place where he can build a small concentric castle on a high bluff overlooking a river. Unless this is totally foreign to the area, you inform him that you can do so.​

I'll admit this one surprised me, when I was looking into what would be involved in my character building a stronghold. Basically, if there's no good reason not to, the DM gives the player a hex on the map to work with (though still retains control of whatever monsters etc. might happen to reside there), and it's up to the player-in-character to clean out the hex of monsters and make it habitable.

As far as technological tropes are concerned, D&D is rather weak for anything where heavy armour is not on the table, because fighters as a class lose access to an important class feature (ie decent AC) without access to heavy armour (including its magic versions).

Perhaps. That said, 0-1-2-5e are all malleable enough to handle even this, via the DM tweaking what classes are available to play and-or changing some classes (Fighter might become Swashbuckler, for example; reliant on Dex and guile and attacking prowess rather than heavy defense).

As far as story tropes are concerned, D&D (outside of 4e) cannot even do something like Conan especially well: in Conan nearly every person is killed or knocked unconscious with a single blow (Conan being an obvious exception) - eg when Conan is attacked by were-hyenas, he dispatches them one blow per hyena.

That's because most of the time Conan in D&D terms is a 25th-level behemoth fighting things a very long way below his pay grade e.g. hyenas.

But in D&D (outside of 4e) were-hyenas would have 4 or so HD and hence double-digit hit points and hence not be able to be punched to death.

For all we know Conan is probably doing double-digit damage with those punches....

That, and is Conan what core D&D is really trying to replicate? I think not. Instead I suggest it's trying more to replicate the LotR/Hobbit parties.

I ran a GH Rolemaster campaign that lasted for 8 years, and an OA Rolemaster campaign that lasted for 9 years.

I'm impressed. Well done.

My first 4e game went for 6+ solid years, but is now played only intermittently as we have an understanding that we won't play it unless everyone can make it.

You're not the first I've heard of who has managed to make a 4e game last well beyond the norm.

There is no correlation between approach to RPGing and length of campaign, in my experience. It's much more about the mechanical capacity of the system to support developments in the story: Rolemaster breaks down between 20th and 30th level; 4e has a cap at 30th level (which is where our game currently is); etc.

To support developments in the story, or mechanical developments in the caracters?

A story or campaign can develop quite happily for a very long time without the characters advancing in level or mechanics at all. It's the mechanical advancement that puts an end to what really should be open-ended; to which the obvious solution is to dramatically slow down said advancement until it becomes an occasional side effect of ongoing play rather than a/the focus of it.

Your 4e game might have had another 6 years in it had you slowed down the advancement; but now you're at 30, and where can you go from there?

So the players may fail to find the adventure at all; or fail to rescue the elves.

I hope it's fairly clear why I call that a railroad.

Actually, it isn't clear at all. A true railroad would not allow for failure - they'd find that adventure no matter what they did, and get run into it somehow. Allowing for failure to even find the adventure in fact speak to the game not being a railroad. Yes the DM has a story in mind and an adventure ready to run, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to get to run it.

And if they do find the adventure but fail to rescue the elves...well, that's just part of the game. PCs don't (or shouldn't) automatically succeed at everything they try; and if their fireball just happens to clip the prison cells where the elves are being held and wipe half of 'em out, all you can say is 'oops'.

The LotR is a novel, not an actual play report. Nothing can be inferred about the actual play of a RPG simply from a post-hoc description of the story.

But consider this: a GM first plots out some backstory about a ring etc. Then writes an episode about a trip to Bree and an escape from the inn there. Then write an episode about travelling to Rivendell, and an attack on Weathertop. Then an episode about a trip through Moria. (This could be thought of as analogous to a DL module, or a short AP.)

Sure. No problem here; the DM has storyboarded out what will ideally hapen if everything goes according to plan, and has her adventure ideas lined up ready to go.

At that point, the basic outline of events is already established. No choices or suggestions that the players make is going to alter it.

And here's where you go off the chart. Player choices can - and almost certainly will, at some point - alter it; and the DM has to be able to roll with that.

Maybe the GM notes include the following sidebar "If the players try to have their PCs avoid Moria by taking the pass, it becomes impassable due to weather." And "If the players try to backtrack through Moria, they find their way blocked by an undefeatable balrog". Etc. But we don't need those little bits of icing to discern the railroad in the cake.

If we take LotR as a game log, we've no way of knowing whether the DM in fact had them storyboarded to get through Caradhras without problem but a combination of her weather tables and player choices got in the way, after which she had to improvise. Maybe Moria wasn't even on the original storyboard!

We don't know, in advance, whether the PCs will make it through all the episodes or not (maybe there is a TPK in Bree; maybe the players can't solve the riddle at the entrance to Moria - although the GM's notes might then allow for an INT check, with a note that the GM should fudge it to make sure the players get the information they need; or perhaps a friendly talking swallow sent by Radagast gives them the answer if the GM thinks they've puzzled about it for long enough). What we do know is that, if the game is to occur, it will have this basic shape with this sequence of events, and it will all be focused on this fiction that the GM has already written.

We know from the game log that they succeeded. What we don't know is how close to the original storyboard the end result wound up.

Using a different example: I keep a log of my game here:

www.friendsofgravity.com/games/decast/dec_adventure_list.html

That page shows the list of adventures played in the current gameworld/campaign, with each one linked to the log for that adventure. (caution: long and possibly very boring reading ahead should you be so brave as to delve into those... )

What you won't know...and my players mostly don't know...is how much resemblance* that list of adventures and the stories told therein has to the original storyboard I drew up for this campaign. The only thing that was nailed down and agreed on by all ahead of time was that the first adventure would be Keep on the Borderlands, because...Keep.

* - hint: not much.

So if this is a railroad, there's sure a lot of interweaving tracks and choices on where to go.

Having control over what I wish for my PC is no control at all, in the context of gameplay. In your model, the players have no ability to actually change the ingame situation. Everything is up to the GM.

Not quite, me hearty. You can't change the ingame situation before you interact with it (just like real life), but once you're there you can change the hell out of it. You can't decide whether or not there's a cottage in that glade ahead - the DM says there is, and so there is - but on seeing it you can decide to burn it down and kill its occupants, thus changing the ingame situation significantly.

The theoretical limit of the players' control is their own characters and what they do; with the results of consequences of their actions reflected by changes to the game world. The more usual limit IME is that the players can make minor changes to the game world that don't and can't affect the run of play (e.g. as a player I can design the cottage or even the village I grew up in provided it's extremely unlikely it will ever enter play).

But a player can't declare "The world has three moons, not two"; nor can she say "The world has two moons, I'm looking for a third" and on a successful check a third moon appears. It just don't work that way.

A player can say "I look for handholds" in my game, just as in yours. The difference is that, in my game, the players' desire for the wall to have handholds is actually relevant to determining whether, in the ficiton, it does or doesn't. (The method I use, to repeat again, is "say 'yes' or roll the dice").

"I look for handholds" forces a determination (or, if pre-determined, a narration) of whether there are any. The difference lies in who makes that determination, and how it's arrived at. As the handholds would or would not have been there regardless of PC interaction, they are thus part of the game world and under the DM's purview. She uses whatever means she likes to determine their presence or absence, and narrates accordingly...which might mean simply saying "There aren't any, as far as you can tell."

No one in this thread has said nothing really exists. I have made the obvious point that imaginary things don't really exist - that's inherent in them being imaginary. Only young children think otherwise.

This is where it gets confusing, as some of us are arguing that from the perspective of the PC it does really exist - the imaginary-to-us game world is the reality the PCs operate in and has to be treated as such when talking about what a PC can observe.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Sorry for the slight.

No need to apologise, but thanks - I was just wanting to make it clear that my accounts of my gaming experiences aren't made up - they are there in those dozens of actual play posts.

My timeline and backstory (sblocked for length):

[sblock]1982 - start playing and GMing Moldvay/Cook/Marsh B/X
1984 - start GMing AD&D.

At this time I had read Lewis Pulsipher's essays in White Dwarf, advocating the "wargaming" style of D&D. I must have read Gygax's accounts in his PHB and DMG too, but don't think I understood them at the time. I had no context outside of the game for making sense of all that advice; and my attempts to implement it failed. I wasn't good at it; my players weren't interested in it. (I've since learned that I'm not a very good wargamer/boardgamer - I lack the patience to develop my position, and so act/commit too early. I've also learned that I like teasing/provoking/prodding my players when I'm GMing, which is pretty much the opposite of dispassionate, neutral Gygaxian/Pulsipherian refereeing.)

Those early games that I GMed weren't meaningfully distinguishable from a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook experience, except that - with a referee rather than a book - there was a bit more flexibility in sequencing of exploration and fighting.

I also had a copy of Classic Traveller from around 1978/79. At first I didn't know what to make of it - it tends to assume the reader knows what a RPG is and how it works. Moldvay Basic is hugely different in this regard - it tells you how to play, and even if the "skilled play" aspect of it isn't something you pick up on (I didn't), it establishes basic procedures like drawing a dungeon map, the PCs exploring the dungeon, etc.

In the early-to-mid 80s I toyed with Traveller again a little bit, but never got beyond the odd bit of skirmishing, some trading rolls, etc. No serious play.

I would say the best part of my first AD&D campaign was when the name level PCs had set up a base, and defended it against a series of plots and attacks from NPC rivals/enemies who had been built up over the course of the campaign. This was my first experience at "scene framing" in response to player-signalled concerns/interests in respect of the shared fiction. (Of course I wouldn't have described it anything like that back then.)

1986-89 - I ran an OA AD&D campaign, and then an all-thieves campaign, starting with the Keep of B2 and then moving first to Critwall and the the City of Greyhawk (using the boxed set). This was where I developed my preferred approach to GMing - "scene-framing" in a way that respnds to player signals and the play of the game, with a character focus but not necessarily that deep or serious. (I think of Claremont X-Men as a big influence on my sense of how adventuring-group-focused serial fiction can work.)

1990 - A very bad experience as a player in a 2nd ed AD&D game with what I would regard as a super-railroading GM (but whom ENworld posters have defended on previous occasions when I've described the episode). It only lasted two or three sessions, I think. My lasting memory is that we were defending a city from kobold infiltrators, and (against the GM's expectations) we captured a kobold. We tried to interrogate it, and get it to show us on a map where the kobolds were coming from. The GM played the kobold as absolutely incapable of meaningful communication (despite kobolds defaulting to Average (but low average) intelligence in AD&D). It was transparent that the GM had a preconception of how the story was going to unfold (I assume he was running some module or other) and the players gaining intelligence about the kobolds was not part of that story.

When that GM indicated that he would be away for our next meeting time (this was a University club game), I arranged with the other players to start a Rolemaster game for them. Which I did - so in effect we sacked our GM (I think we invited him to join the RM game if he wanted; he declined, and I believe got new players). That RM game continued from early 1990 to late 1997, with a shifting cast of players and PCs (though a couple were constant from 1991 onward, and one of the originals, who had moved to the US, would drop in whenever he was back in Melbourne). A few of the players who joined over the years were refugees from standard (ie railroading) AD&D games. The campaign became fairly well-known in the club for byzantine mechanics (that's RM for you), byzantine backstory, and some interesting characters.

This same group also did some other RPGing together, in the club and at local conventions - we especially enjoyed (and sometimes won prizes for) BRP systems - RQ, CoC, Stormbringer, etc. At conventions they had two strengths compared to (eg) D&D games: first, the GMs tended to be better (more evocative in their play of NPCs, more impassioned in their framing, etc); second, the game was more likely to be focused on a single big conflict, with earlier scenes and sessions being build-ups to the payoff. (I woudln't have been able to articulate this analysis at the time, but can see it in retrospect.) The pre-gens gave everyone some starting motivations, and that would be enough to give you direction through the set-up. But then in the big finale it as your vision of your PC that came to the fore, as you had to choose (eg) between honouring alliances or betaying the group for some other commitment.

I can't really do that sort of evocative GMing, but I think I learned some lessons from the way those games were structured. In retrospect, they illustrated the difference between tight framing and railroad.

In the mid-to-late 90s (95(?)-97) I played in a 2nd ed AD&D game. This was also quite influential on my thinking. The GM's efforts were a railroad of the classic type - there was a prophecy (connected to some game this guy had run for a different group) and he would drip-feed us clues but never really signal whether we were making any progress in our interpretation.

It was quite a big group of players (six or seven), most who had no connections outside the game, and so what happened was that we (as players) made up our own game, involving a mix of our own backstories for our PCs and the connections we developed between PCs playing the game. This was especially easy because the GM spent more time with the "prophesied" PC's player than with any single other player, which gave the rest of us "free time", which we would fill in in-character rather than with out-of-game chatter, precisely because we didn't really know one another out of game. Some of this also fed back into our interpretations of the prophecy.

At a certain point it clearly got too much for the GM, because he time-shifted the whole thing 100 (? or so) years into the future, which basically invalidated all the connections, backstory, intreprations etc that we had built up as players, allowing him to reassert his authority over the fiction. I quit that game a session or two after that, and I think it broke up completley not long after.

For me, it was an abject lession in how railroading and GM control is the enemy of player engagement and creative contributions.

Anyway, my first RM campagin eventually came to an end when I started full time work, and so didn't have the time to take proper notes to manage the backstory. This, together with weaknesses in high-level RM mechanics (especially around scry-fly-die), meant that a good campaign (which I think probably peaked around 1994/95) had a slightly ignomious TPK ending. One thing I discovered running this game was that extensive campaign world notes were largely redundant, except as a tool for generating situations, and for integrating, and establishing context for, players' desires for the game.

To elaborate a bit on that last point: the game (set in Greyhawk, although in this thread from a while ago some posters argued that the way the setting was adapted and developed made it a not-really-GH game) had a pretty extensive ancient history backstory, and that was something that the players (via their PCs) gradually learned as the game unfolded. Because of the way RM knowledge skills work, the players dont really have the capacity to establish that sort of backstory via checks (contrast, say, Burning Wheel or Cortex+ Heroic); what a knowledge check does is oblige the GM to reveal some new bit of backstory that is salient to the players' concerns (because that's why his/her PC wants to know). But that backstory was developed by me over the course of the campaign, with initial thoughts being dropped or reworked or amplified to reflect where the players were taking the campaign and what they cared about. At the start of the campaign, neither I nor the players had any conception of the Great Kingdom except, perhaps, as the "evil, tyrannical empire to the east of Greyhawk City". By the end of the game, it was established that the Great Kingdom was a type of heir to the Suel Empire, riven by some of the same splits (political, religious, metaphysical) that had riven the Suel Empire - and the PCs were taking various stands in relation to that history, tyring to make the Great Kingdom what they wanted it to be in relation to that history. In this context, it made no sense to have big lists of events currently taking place in the GK or other parts of the gameworld - because these had to be adapted to reflect what was going on in play, both in terms of "ingame causation" and "narrative causation". (Rolemaster emphasises the former for the local consequences of character actions, but has no ingame causation oriented mechanics for social and political developments.)

1998-2008 - We started a new (Oriental Adventures) Rolemaster game after the first RM campaign ended, which ran until the end of 2008. I used what I had learned about both campaign management and issues with RM's mechanics to help make sure this game didn't collapse under it's own weight. (At one point I toyed with trying to move the campaign to HARP - a RM-lite also published by Iron Crown - but the group didn't want to.) I say more about the ending of this game in reply to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] below.

Some time around 2000-ish I bought the HeroWars rulebooks, but at that time couldn't work out how the system was meant to work. (It's a free-descriptor system with both simple contest and complex contest resolution options, all based on "closed scene" resolution.) In early 2004 I discovered The Forge. For me, that was like a revelation. It took a lot of thinking, and required me to revisit and correct some uthinking assumptions I'd made about RPGing, but it made sense of so much of my RPGing experience - I could see RM as a "purist for system" simulation engine, but also could see that my group was using it to run a "vanilla" narrativist/"story now" game (ie one without any funky mechanics); and I could see why my attempt to use RQ for the same purpose hadn't worked (RQ doesn't give the player enough control over either PC build or the minutiae of action resolution to send signals - eg there is no such thing as "effort" in RQ action resolution - whereas RM is different in both respects). BRP can work for one-shots, but not (in my view, given what I'm looking for) for a campaign. (I used to think Classic Traveller had the same problem as BRP in this respect; my current experiences have made me look at CT in a new light, though. But I don't think RQ has the features that CT has that make it amenable to vanilla narrativist play. But it's possible I'm wrong about that, and that my past failures just showed a lack of GM mastery of the appropriate techniques.)

The Forge also let me make sense of the HeroWars rules. And then when D&D 4e was announced, and being discussed, it was clear to me that it was going to meld aspects of HeroWars (which around then was re-released and subsequently genericised as HeroQuest and HeroQuest revised) with traditional D&D mechanics, but abandoning the (in my view failed) simulationist accretions of 2nd ed AD&D and 3E while embracing the heroic and gonzoe romantic fantasy aspect of play first heralded in the Foreword to Moldvay Basic (with the tale of the overthrow of the dragon tyrant using the sword gifted by the mysterious cleric) but not delivered by earlier versions of D&D. Even as announcements about the direction of 4e seemed to cause chaos and apoplexy, the design direction seemed crystal clear to me and the published rules delivered on that 100%. (That's not to say 4e is perfect at what it does. There are active threads at the moment on the "old D&D editions" subforum that discuss ways in which 4e might have been improved. But nevertheless, it delivers what it promises on the tin.)

2009 - As more group members moved overseas, we merged two groups which had overlapping members and overlapped more generally in friendship circles. From 2009 to mid-2013 I GMed 4e exclusively, for this group. And through 2016 it remained the group's primary game. That campaign has reached 30th level, but is not resolved as the PCs have not yet recovered the seventh part of the Rod of Seven Parts, and haven't decided what to do if they do find it - they are all of the view that the Dusk War needs to be averted somehow, but have differing views on the best way to do that. We have also started a Dark Sun game, although it remains in its early stages.

But over the past few years I've also GMed Buring Wheel, Cortex+ Heroice (both Marvel and a Fantasy Hack), a session of AD&D (for nostalgia purposes when one of the emigrants returned for a holiday), and most recently Classic Traveller. None of these games is the same as the other - just to give one example, in Burning Wheel fictional positioning factors directly into resolution (a player can seek an advantage die if s/he thinks that his/her PC's ficitonal positioning would help; the system has other mechanisms, connected to character advancment, that mean players don't always want to roll the maximum number of dice they might be able to lobby for); whereas in Cortex fictional positioning only provides a basis for establishing an asset in the course of action resolution, which can then provide a bonus die to subsequent actions - so fictional positioning is mediated throught the action economy and player action declarations rather than impacting directly, which makes the game less gritty than BW, and also (I would say) a bit less visceral.

Nevertheless, I find that all can be run in my preferred style (conceived of relatively broadly): the PCs have dramatic needs, which means the players have things they want out of the game; I describe a situation that puts pressure on those needs/wants; action delcarations are therefore made; we resolve those, which helps establish elements of a new situation; and then we keep going.

And to put it in negative/contrastive terms: since 1995 or thereabouts I think I have drawn maybe half-a-dozen "dungeon" maps: I remember one for a dragon lair in the OA game; a handful in the heroic tier of the 4e game, when some dungeon exploration seemed to make sense; and randomly generating a dungeon (using DMG Appendix A) for the AD&D session. I've used some building floorplan maps in RM too, and obviously lots of them in 4e, but as situations in their own right, not as components of big bits of setting to be explored by the players.

In Cortex+ and Traveller there have been no maps at all (action resolution doesn't need them in Cortex, and Traveller doesn't really need them either - my "star map" is just a list of worlds with jump distances to other worlds that have come up in the game, and a little sketch that illustrates the same thing geometrically). And in BW we use the GM maps for "big picture" stuff, and I used the Keep map from B2 for the keep on the borderlands between Hardby and the Abor-Alz.

These are the experiences that underpin my posts about how RPGing can be, in this and other threads.[/sblock]

There is no correlation between approach to RPGing and length of campaign, in my experience. It's much more about the mechanical capacity of the system to support developments in the story: Rolemaster breaks down between 20th and 30th level; 4e has a cap at 30th level (which is where our game currently is); etc.

To support developments in the story, or mechanical developments in the caracters?

A story or campaign can develop quite happily for a very long time without the characters advancing in level or mechanics at all. It's the mechanical advancement that puts an end to what really should be open-ended; to which the obvious solution is to dramatically slow down said advancement until it becomes an occasional side effect of ongoing play rather than a/the focus of it.

Your 4e game might have had another 6 years in it had you slowed down the advancement; but now you're at 30, and where can you go from there?

In D&D, developments in the story and mechanical developments in the characters are correlated. As PCs advance from being figures of local significance to important rulers or representatives of gods and empires to (in 4e) being cosmological figures in their own right, naturally the scope and stakes of the fiction grow. (4e articulates this by reference to the "tiers" of play: heroic, paragon and epic. This is set out in both the PHB and the DMG.) At a certain point, the story comes to a natural end, and/or the mechanics lack the capacity to support any further escalation (eg in RM, the PCs become "paragon"-like somewhere between 12th to 15th level; by the mid-20s the mechanics fail to support a full-fledged escalation to cosmological/epic, but the PCs have too much mechanical capacity to face meaningful "paragon"-type challenges - that's what I mean when I say the system breaks down).

Slowing down advancement doesn't necessarily help, though - in D&D the scope of the story can't develop without commensurate mechanical development, and if the scope of the story doesn't advance then it is easy to get stuck in stale, repetitive storytelling (an example from serial fiction in another mode: how many bad marriages has Aunt May had to be rescued from by Peter/Spidey - Mysterio, Doc Ock and no doubt countless others that I'm not aware of, having stopped reading Spidey in the mid-80s).

I can see my Traveller game eventualy reaching its denouement also - in Traveller, if the players have paid off their ship or have acquired some sort of high-quality cruiser or similar; have access to all the best tech; have located the Psionics Institute; etc - then what else is left for the game? Where is it going to go? Not every story is never-ending, especially in a medium (RPGing) which tends to place such a focus on character development.

A big influence on the way I ended our OA RM game came from reading about Paul Czege's My Life With Master (I don't own a copy, and so have never read or played it, but I know it incorporates an explicit endgame mechanic), and from downloading and reading his Nicotine Girls. I can't imagine actually playing Nicotine Girls, but it also has an explicit endgame mechanic. I framed an explicity engame situation for the OA game, the culmination of the last 10 years of play. We resolved it through a mixture of fictional positioning + saying "yes", and action resolution mechanics. It almost seemed that the PC "paladin "was going to have to sacrifice himself to save his god (who was trapped, dying/dead, in the void beyond the material world of space and time in an eternal struggle with a being of that realm who hoped to enter and destroy the material world); and the player was ready to commit his PC in this way. But then the players (I can't remember which one, or whether it was a collective thing) realised that they could use the "Soul Totem" they had been gifted by a banished god (the idea for that artefact comes from the 3E module Bastion of Broken Souls) to "split" the PC's karmic trajectory, investing his karmic "history" into a simulacrum (which another PC had the power to create) thus giving it the wherewithal to take the god's place in the battle, while the PC would be free to return to the material world and found a monastery on the island which was (in fact) the head of the giant stone body of his god where it had "died" on the material world blocking the entrance of the voidal entity.

I can't say the sentimentalist in me was disappointed by this happy outcome; but it was a result of the players engaging what the ingame situation had become, not the result of them guessing the solution to a GM-authored puzzle that I put in front of them.

With the final situation resolved, the other players also narrated the future destinies of their PCs, and it was quite interesting as (for instance) we got to see how the less assuming of the two main samurai PCs - through his courship (player-initiated) of a NPC wizard whome the PCs had encountered and rescued - had actually set himself up to establish a dynasty with an important role in sealing the barrier between the world and the void (but because it was a series of mortals over the generations, rather than a single god, would not go made from exposure to the void as had happened to the dead god); whereas the more dominant samurai had secured his own worldly position as lord of an important seaport, but did not have so much to offer to the metaphysical security of coming generations of mortals.

This sort of free narration of the campagin resolution, in collaboration between GM (as framer and provocateur) and players (as advocates for their PCs, but constrained by the established fiction), is to me the opposite of a module or AP ending, where the GM knows from the outset what the final situation will be, what the solution space is, and what the denouement is (more-or-less) going to look like.

A true railroad would not allow for failure - they'd find that adventure no matter what they did, and get run into it somehow. Allowing for failure to even find the adventure in fact speak to the game not being a railroad. Yes the DM has a story in mind and an adventure ready to run, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to get to run it.

And if they do find the adventure but fail to rescue the elves...well, that's just part of the game. PCs don't (or shouldn't) automatically succeed at everything they try

<snip>

the DM has storyboarded out what will ideally hapen if everything goes according to plan, and has her adventure ideas lined up ready to go.

<snip>

Player choices can - and almost certainly will, at some point - alter it; and the DM has to be able to roll with that.

If we take LotR as a game log, we've no way of knowing whether the DM in fact had them storyboarded to get through Caradhras without problem but a combination of her weather tables and player choices got in the way, after which she had to improvise. Maybe Moria wasn't even on the original storyboard!

A "true railroad" is - in my view - a game in which the GM determines the significant possible outcomes. So a game in which the only solution is X doesn't cease to be a railroad just because the players fail to identify X. To give a simple example: it is possible for my character to die in a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook, but those books obviously count as railroads - it's all prescripted on the page in clear black type.

As for the storyboard and going off script - what's the point of the storyboard? What's it for. If the GM is really ready to follow the leads of the players, and to introduce new story elements in response to evinced desires/inclinations/suggestions etc, then why bother writing a story that only you will read and that is of no utility to actual play?

 

[Sadras]

Pretty much exactly the role described throughout this thread by @pemerton (and elucidated at times by @Manbearcat): frame the PCs into scenes signaled by their character builds and stated goals and motivations, adjudicate the result of PC failure according to the mechanics of the game system, etc.

Do you ever frame scenes/adventure scenarios which are not signalled by the character builds or stated goals?

For instance, the PCs are travelling via ship - do you introduce a complication where no die have been rolled or called for, such as an attack by a group of sea trolls serving a covey of sea witches which may or may not play a role further along the campaign.

 

[Sadras]

As for the storyboard and going off script - what's the point of the storyboard? What's it for. If the GM is really ready to follow the leads of the players, and to introduce new story elements in response to evinced desires/inclinations/suggestions etc, then why bother writing a story that only you will read and that is of no utility to actual play?

The story could be as much as 30 pages of detail to a mere 5 significant lines. The Tyranny of Dragons adventure path is two books full of detail which are there to assist the DM, but all the information is not necessary to run the AP.

 

[pemerton]

As far as story tropes are concerned, D&D (outside of 4e) cannot even do something like Conan especially well: in Conan nearly every person is killed or knocked unconscious with a single blow (Conan being an obvious exception) - eg when Conan is attacked by were-hyenas, he dispatches them one blow per hyena.

That's because most of the time Conan in D&D terms is a 25th-level behemoth fighting things a very long way below his pay grade e.g. hyenas.
For all we know Conan is probably doing double-digit damage with those punches....

That, and is Conan what core D&D is really trying to replicate? I think not. Instead I suggest it's trying more to replicate the LotR/Hobbit parties.

You could model such a thing in third edition, through use of the Power Attack feat. There's no conceptual issue with Conan being level 20 while everyone else is level 1-3. It just doesn't make for a very exciting narrative, because we see how skewed the odds really are.

Back in the OGL days, when everything was getting converted to d20, one of the games which made the transition was called Testament. It was supposed to be a game about role-playing in the Biblical era, and it included conversions for many Biblical figures into d20. Relevant to the topic at hand, it has Goliath as something like a level 13 giant fighter, and David is like a level 25 multiclass rogue/priest/paladin. It doesn't change the events of the story in any way; it just changes our interpretation of them.

This proves my point. If the only way you can use D&D to emulate Conan (or the Biblical stories) is by using it in a way that is so counterintuitive (eg 25th level PCs vs 1st to 3rd level opponents) then that shows that traditional D&D can't do the story tropes of Conan. Whereas, say, RM or RQ can without needing to use the system in such a bizarre way, although it will fail in other departments - eg Conan will probably die quite early one unless the dice deliver resuts that are astronomically improbable; and 4e can do it pretty straightforwardly if you use only martial classes plus some rituals, and stick to Heroic and perhaps Paragon tier.

A player has at least as much control over the game world as the player has over the real world; often significantly moreso, since they are acting in the capacity of their PCs, many of which possess great skill or strength or magical ability. Which is exactly the amount of control that the players should want, if they mean to actually role-play and not just tell a story.

You can't change the ingame situation before you interact with it (just like real life), but once you're there you can change the hell out of it. You can't decide whether or not there's a cottage in that glade ahead - the DM says there is, and so there is - but on seeing it you can decide to burn it down and kill its occupants, thus changing the ingame situation significantly.

The theoretical limit of the players' control is their own characters and what they do; with the results of consequences of their actions reflected by changes to the game world.

Comparisons to real life are in my view quite misleading.

The way that it becomes true that I pick up a cup is that (i) some causal process has brought it about that there is a cup in my vicinity; (ii) perceptual processes bring it about that I am aware of said cup; (iii) other complex neural processes bring it about that motor functions in my body are triggerd (colloquially speaking, I decide to pick up the cup I can see); (iv) my arm and hand move (in virtue of various mechanical forces transmitted from my muscles through my bones etc) and, via various mechanical processes (to do with the rigidity of the cup, friction between my fingers and it, etc) interact with the cup such as to pick it up.

The way it becomes true that my PC picks up a cup is that (i) some social causal process has brought it about that I and my fellow players agree that there is a cup in the vicinity of my PC; (ii) a complex neural process occurs within me (colloquially speaking, I decide to declare an action for my PC); (iii) a mixture of neural and motor functions results in my voicing the outcome of that neural process (ie I state my action declaration); (iv) some sensory processes lead to my fellow players, including the GM, knowing my action declaration; (v) further neural processes in my fellow players, including the GM, that then feed into social causal processes - possibly in conjunction with some motor processes (eg rolling dice) and external mechanical processes (dice falling to the table and coming to a stop) and sensory procegsses (ie reading the dice) - generate assent that my PC has, indeed, picked up a cup.

The above are of course the barest of sketches, but they illustrate the difference between the activity of picking up a cup, and the activity of contributing to the authorship of a shared ficiton in which an imaginary person picks up a cup.

As far as player impact on the game, railroading, etc are concerned, what is key is step (v) in the second of the above two paragraphs - ie how do we, as RPGers, generate assent that the PC has picked up a cup? What are the rules, habits, expectations, etc that guide this?

In [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s game, the GM always has a veto at step (v). Hence the player does not have control over whether or not his/her PC picks up a cup - the best that s/he can do is make it true that the PC wants to pick up a cup.

To say that the veto is exercised "fairly", or "neutrally", or by reference to the "truth" about the gameworld (eg the GM has secretly determined, at some point or other, that the "cup" the PC can "perceive" is really an illusion) is neither here nor there as far as my point is concerned - that the GM exercises the veto for some reason doesn't stop it being a veto. In other words, outcomes only occur in the fiction if they are consistent with what the GM is prepared to permit the fiction to be. The players don't have control over outcomes in the fiction - at best they can force the GM to choose between alternatives. (Is or isn't the PC going to be allowd to pick up a cup?)

The more usual limit IME is that the players can make minor changes to the game world that don't and can't affect the run of play (e.g. as a player I can design the cottage or even the village I grew up in provided it's extremely unlikely it will ever enter play).

But a player can't declare "The world has three moons, not two"; nor can she say "The world has two moons, I'm looking for a third" and on a successful check a third moon appears. It just don't work that way.

In the real world, an astronomer once said "This solar system has six planets; I'm looking for a seventh" - and low and behold, he discovered Uranus. Rinse and repeat for every astronomical discovery since.

There is nothing remotely unrealistic or threatening to verisimilitude for a PC to discover a hitherto unknown astronomical phenomenon.

As well as in the context of action declaration, players can and do contribute to framing and backstory authorship. I've already quoted the Gygax passage in which he encourages the GM to allow the player to establish geographic details for his/her stronghold. And in my Traveller game, in accordance with advice given in Book 3 (published in 1977), it was a player who decided that the best way to make sense of the randomly-generated starting world was that it was a gas giant moon.

I appreciate that in your game PCs never discover things the GM didn't already pre-author; and, apparently, never contribute directly to estabishing any significant elements of backstory or framing. But I don't think that's particuarly typical at all. When I started my first RM campaign in 1990, one of the players authored the backstory for his PC's mentor, including living in a hollow tree, and being a wizard on the run from, and in hiding from, powerful enemies - hence why he was living in a small village tutoring a relatively insignificant young mageling.

No one in our group regarded it as at all remarkable that a player would exercise that degree of control over what obviously was, and would go on to be affirmed as, a significant story element, although the only RPGs we were familiar with were the standard ones like D&D, RQ, RM, Traveller, etc.

"I look for handholds" forces a determination (or, if pre-determined, a narration) of whether there are any. The difference lies in who makes that determination, and how it's arrived at. As the handholds would or would not have been there regardless of PC interaction, they are thus part of the game world and under the DM's purview. She uses whatever means she likes to determine their presence or absence, and narrates accordingly...which might mean simply saying "There aren't any, as far as you can tell."

Again, this is a description of your method. It's not a description of how RPG per se work. The Classic Traveller description of the Streetwise and Bribery skills, for instance - written in 1977 - puts forward a different method from what you describe.

With Bribery, there is a reaction check first, and if that comes up hostile (the player knows the result, and in my game rolls the reaction check) then bribery can't succeed. If the reaction is neutral or positive, then the Bribery check is made, and that is how we learn whether or not this NPC is amenable to being bribed.

With Streetwise, the way we find out whether or not their are shady arms dealers on a world is by finding out whether or not a player's Streetwise check succeeds in locating them. The system does not use this approach for all such inquiries, however; when it comes to the Psionics Institute, the GM first makes a secret roll to find out if a branch is present on world, and then the player makes a check, with Streetwise serving as a bonus, to try and look for ti; but this check can only succeed if the GM's roll also came up positive. The practical difference is that, because of the interaction between dice rolls, it is much less likely that a given world will have a branch of the institute than a gang of shady arms dealers; and that the GM can know the truth about the Institute independently of the player knowing it, whereas if the check to find arms dealers fails it is left open whether that is because there are none, or because the PC failed to find them.

So here we have examples, from 1977, where the details of the situation (social analogues of "are there firm handholds") are expressly determined not prior to the resolution attempt, but as part of the proces of resolution. I don't know what Marc Miller had in mind exaclty when he wrote these rules, but to me they are clear illustrations that the way I handle action resolution is a very intuitive way of adjudicating action declarations and establishing the fiction in a RPG - especially in contexts (like the social ones I've described) where it is (i) impractical for the GM to establish all the details in advance, and (ii) it is more interesting to establish details in the context of gameplay rather than prior to it.

When you live in a world where things only become fixed once they are observed, you have to be careful about what you choose to observe (which is not the main complaint here, but it is ridiculous and worth mentioning).

Only young children (or someone indoctrinated into the cult of meta-gaming) would fail to grasp that, for the purposes of meaningful resolution, we must treat imaginary things as though they did exist. The fact that things are imaginary cannot possibly affect how they resolve, because they are only imaginary in an out-of-game context.

This is where it gets confusing, as some of us are arguing that from the perspective of the PC it does really exist - the imaginary-to-us game world is the reality the PCs operate in and has to be treated as such when talking about what a PC can observe.

I find the passage I've just quoted from Saelorn largely impenetrable.

But anyway, it is obvious that from the perspective of the PCs the gameworld exists. No one is suppposing that, in the fiction, the state of the handholds is a result of the PC's desire to climb the wall; or that the readiness (or otherwise) of the official to be bribed is a result of the PC's attempt to bribe her.

But that is a banal point. It tells us nothing about how to establish those elements of the fiction; and absolutely central to the playing of a RPG is establishing a shared fiction. Someone has to do it; it won't write itself.

I can treat the imaginary cup as though it does exist; hence, I know that it may be amenable to being picked up. But how do I know whether or not it has a hitherto unnoticed hairline fracture in the handle, such that when that is grasped the handle will in fact break off? Likewise for the handholds - treating them as real tells me that, for instance, they are probably made of rock or earth rather than (say) jelly or big piles of cinnamon. But it doesn't tell me what their weight-bearing capacity is.

The established details of any RPG fiction are simply not sufficient to generate, by sheer inference from what is already established, all subsequent details that are relevant to resolution of declared actions. So we need to generate new fiction. There are different ways to do that. The GM making stuff up, or rolling dice and reading off a table, is an out-of-game happening, just as much as is a player wishing for something to be true in the fiction; or just as much as the GM narrating something in the context of establishing consequences of action resolution. Which of these methods you prefer in your RPGing is a fundamental question of play and of design, but has no bearing on whether or not the game you're playing is a RPG. And the gameworld doesn't become any more "real" or "objective" because the GM does all the authoring independent of the processes of action resolution, or of the desires of the players.

 

[pemerton]

The story could be as much as 30 pages of detail to a mere 5 significant lines. The Tyranny of Dragons adventure path is two books full of detail which are there to assist the DM, but all the information is not necessary to run the AP.

This doesn't really answer the question, though. How does that two books worth of detail assist the DM, if the DM is just going to ignore it and follow the players' leads?

Do you ever frame scenes/adventure scenarios which are not signalled by the character builds or stated goals?

For instance, the PCs are travelling via ship - do you introduce a complication where no die have been rolled or called for, such as an attack by a group of sea trolls serving a covey of sea witches which may or may not play a role further along the campaign.

I will answer this question for my part.

It depends on the system I'm running. In Burning Wheel or Cortex+, the answer is no. The rules of those games are (among other things) devoted to ensuring that the GM always goes where the action is.

4e is more obscure in this department, but - if one takes seriously the idea about player-authored quests etc, plus the stuff about "skipping to the fun" (which I take to be a slightly less confident way of saying "go where the action is") - then it seems to point the same way. And that's certainly how I run it.

In Classic Traveller, random encounters are a key part of the system, which relies heavily on random content generation to generate the feel of the universe through which the PCs travel. My own approach is to try and link those random encounters into the bigger picture as much as possible, so that the game doesn't get diverted from going where the action is.

To illustrate: in my most recent session, there were three random encounters: with some people onworld; with an animal onworld; and with a starship while leaving the world. The "people" encounter was with bandits; I ran that encounter as a group of locals trying to stop the PCs getting back on board their ship's boat to return to orbit. On a low-tech, high law-level world which the PCs might want to come back to, this therefore forced them to make choices about how they confronted the bandits and what sort of reputation they wanted to leave behind them: they chose to use their technological advantage to utterly crush the bandits, but weren't able to stop one escaping and so are now known, onworld, to have blown up bandits with unlawful high tech weaponry.

The animal roll on the encounter table turned up a small, solitary insectivore - I narrated it as being discovered in the cargo hold after they lifted off (having wandered in unnoticed at some point either when the PCs were unloading or redocking their air/raft), and the PCs were able to take a blood sample to try and identify its biological connection to the people on the planet, who were knonw to have alien (ie non-human) elements in their DNA. So the animal encounter figured into one part of the "big picture".

The starship encounter was with a pirate cruiser. I decided that it's "piratical" nature consisted in its being connected to the secret bioweapons conspiracy the PCs are investigating. This was the end of the session, but the next session will probably begin with the PCs either trying to take the cruiser, or alternatively using its absence from the world where the bioweapons research is taking place as their cue to jump to that world with a reduced chance of being blown up by an enemy cruiser!

I don't think what I've described is the only way, or even the canonical way, to run Classic Traveller, but it's how I've been doing it.

 

[Sadras]

This doesn't really answer the question, though. How does that two books worth of detail assist the DM, if the DM is just going to ignore it and follow the players' leads?

The AP provides Backgrounds available for the PCs to tie up the characters to the story.
The APs allows the DM to generate a timeline which reflects on the ever changing nature of the Sword Coast due to the Cult of the Dragon's progress.

Should the PCs decide to skip a section or two within the book and pursue their own agenda of stopping the Cult or even something else - the DM is able to inflict on their meanderings various characters, framed scenes and resultant fall outs of the Cult's activities. This is not railroading but content generation for the PCs to get the feel of the setting as in your Classic Traveller.
The books from that point of view become useful as setting content and act as a guideline.

I don't think what I've described is the only way, or even the canonical way, to run Classic Traveller, but it's how I've been doing it.

That is fair. Do you roll for this beforehand (pre the adventure) so that you may have time to think on how to tie these random encounters to the main storyline or on the spot?

See, personally, I prefer to have the time available to be able to have a think about it and not being put on the spot. This then allows me to frame a scene such as the sea trolls and a social encounter with the covey of sea hags and not have to think too much about motivation besides the fact that they want slaves and treasure from the vessel the PCs are on. Sessions later, I might decide to use these NPCs again but tie them in tighter to the main storyline.

 

[Lanefan]

And to put it in negative/contrastive terms: since 1995 or thereabouts I think I have drawn maybe half-a-dozen "dungeon" maps: I remember one for a dragon lair in the OA game; a handful in the heroic tier of the 4e game, when some dungeon exploration seemed to make sense; and randomly generating a dungeon (using DMG Appendix A) for the AD&D session. I've used some building floorplan maps in RM too, and obviously lots of them in 4e, but as situations in their own right, not as components of big bits of setting to be explored by the players.

I simply can't imagine trying to run a dungeon crawl without a map - within minutes I'd end up having different rooms trying to occupy the same space, distances and features that didn't line up, and so forth. Also, as players we meticulously map the dungeons we explore (as I would absolutely insist on doing were I in your game); the assumption being that if there is no map there's a risk of getting lost...which means the DM's map or imagination has to be good enough to make things line up properly.

In D&D, developments in the story and mechanical developments in the characters are correlated.

Only to a point. All editions of D&D have a "sweet spot*" in terms of what levels are the best for good play, and it behooves any DM to try and keep her game within this range for as long as possible. So, how to do this? First, slow down the advance rate to a crawl. Then, instead of expecting the party to on average level up once or twice per adventure, try running three adventures per level and (by whatever means) stringing those adventures together into a story. Now you've got something that'll take 30 adventures to get through 10th level instead of just 6 or 7. The levels still advance and the story and characters still develop, only they spend longer at each stage...and as a pleasant side effect the sweet spot also lasts longer.

* - in 1e and 2e it's about 3rd to 9th level; in 3e about 4th to 12th. Not sure about 4e and 5e other than having heard it's still a thing.

As PCs advance from being figures of local significance to important rulers or representatives of gods and empires to (in 4e) being cosmological figures in their own right, naturally the scope and stakes of the fiction grow. (4e articulates this by reference to the "tiers" of play: heroic, paragon and epic. This is set out in both the PHB and the DMG.)

I know about 4e's tiers. They kind of bake in what might be an erroneus assumption, however; that a campaign is going to go from "figures of local significance" to "cosmological figures in their own right". I much prefer a campaign that takes quite some time to get from "neophyte adventurers just starting out" to maybe "important local rulers or power-brokers" or "bad-asses nobody wants to mess with". In my eyes "figures of local significance" is already some way along the campaign's trail.

At a certain point, the story comes to a natural end

Not if you can weave numerous different stories in such that one starts partway through another so when the first ends the second is in full swing and a third is starting to rear its head.

and/or the mechanics lack the capacity to support any further escalation (eg in RM, the PCs become "paragon"-like somewhere between 12th to 15th level; by the mid-20s the mechanics fail to support a full-fledged escalation to cosmological/epic, but the PCs have too much mechanical capacity to face meaningful "paragon"-type challenges - that's what I mean when I say the system breaks down).

Yes this is a bigger problem, solved as I said earlier by massively delaying that point from arriving. Or, plan B: tweaking the rules so the system can handle higher levels.

Slowing down advancement doesn't necessarily help, though - in D&D the scope of the story can't develop without commensurate mechanical development, and if the scope of the story doesn't advance then it is easy to get stuck in stale, repetitive storytelling

Yes, this can happen if one isn't careful and-or paying attention. But there's many stories to be told within any given scope.

(an example from serial fiction in another mode: how many bad marriages has Aunt May had to be rescued from by Peter/Spidey - Mysterio, Doc Ock and no doubt countless others that I'm not aware of, having stopped reading Spidey in the mid-80s).

Lost on me - I don't do comics. (which happily means I can enjoy the Marvel movies unencombered by any thought of canon)

I can see my Traveller game eventualy reaching its denouement also - in Traveller, if the players have paid off their ship or have acquired some sort of high-quality cruiser or similar; have access to all the best tech; have located the Psionics Institute; etc - then what else is left for the game? Where is it going to go? Not every story is never-ending, especially in a medium (RPGing) which tends to place such a focus on character development.

And that right there is the crux of it. Get the focus off of mechanical character development and on to a) characterization development and b) the here-and-now story being played out (regardless how said story is being generated) and you're good to go...and keep going.

<snip>

This sort of free narration of the campagin resolution, in collaboration between GM (as framer and provocateur) and players (as advocates for their PCs, but constrained by the established fiction), is to me the opposite of a module or AP ending, where the GM knows from the outset what the final situation will be, what the solution space is, and what the denouement is (more-or-less) going to look like.

I've been running my current campaign for close to ten years and I've no clue what the final situation or denouement will look like. I've got about three years worth of adventures on the current storyboard (which has proven over time to be a rather malleable document; see below) but I know full well that one or more of the following could happen:

- we play through everything I've got and then keep going into more that I haven't thought of yet
- we more or less play through what I've got and then call it quits
- we play through other stories and adventures that come out of the run of play independent of anything I've thought of
- the game winds down sooner for other reasons e.g. players leave or I burn out or whatever

A "true railroad" is - in my view - a game in which the GM determines the significant possible outcomes.

Then every game is a railroad, even yours; because going in to any situation - big picture or small pitcure - there's going to be three possible outcomes that are dictated by the logic of the game: success, failure, or something unexpected. What a DM can pre-determine isn't the possible outcomes (those are already locked in by that logic), but what happens next because of each of those possible outcomes - and that's her job. She needs to be looking ahead to both "what happens if they succeed?" and "what happens if they fail?" while always being ready for the unexpected; and if her notes are any good she already knows what happens on success or failure and thus doesn't need to make it up on the fly, needing only to make stuff up if the unexpected occurs.

As for the storyboard and going off script - what's the point of the storyboard? What's it for. If the GM is really ready to follow the leads of the players, and to introduce new story elements in response to evinced desires/inclinations/suggestions etc, then why bother writing a story that only you will read and that is of no utility to actual play?

"Writing a story" is gilding the lily a bit.

My storyboard consists of a series of lists of adventures, some connected together into vague APs, with notes on what level range each is for and about how long I expect each will take to play through. There's also notes on some key plot ideas, possible enemies or villains, and on how some of these various adventures or paths might fit together and interweave; relevant as I've multiple parties in my game and need to consider which group might end up doing what and which active characters have encountered which plot points etc. during their careers. I also note whether a particular canned module will fill the bill for any given adventure or whether I have to design it myself.

This all fits on one page.

Every year or so I re-do it, knocking off things that have been completed, adding in ideas I've had since I did up the last version, tweaking it to suit what I can actually run (e.g. for some years I was running two games a week, but for a while now it's been one), and so forth. Knowing what might be coming down the road allows me to drop hints in now, whether they're picked up on or not.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

This doesn't really answer the question, though. How does that two books worth of detail assist the DM, if the DM is just going to ignore it and follow the players' leads?

In my case it's not two books (yikes!) but one page, mostly for if the players don't give me any leads (or any leads I'm interested in running; I'm not keen on running something I'm not interested in).

In Burning Wheel or Cortex+, the answer is no. The rules of those games are (among other things) devoted to ensuring that the GM always goes where the action is.

Whether she wants to or not. The GM in such games is kind of forced into running with whatever storylines the players give her, largely regardless of what she'd like to run; yet she still has to do the heavy lifting when it comes to narration and action resolution. Bleah.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Whether she wants to or not. The GM in such games is kind of forced into running with whatever storylines the players give her, largely regardless of what she'd like to run; yet she still has to do the heavy lifting when it comes to narration and action resolution. Bleah.

Have you played either game? Or any game run in a similar style?

Obviously if you don't think your players will give you interesting material to work with, that might be an issue. Happily, I can rely upon my players!