The problem that I have is that it is being portrayed as only 2 choices. Story now = player involvement, pre-authored = player just along for the ride.
I agree that there is sometimes an element of that. But there is also an element of "pre-authored campaigns are rich, many-layered worlds bursting with life whereas develop-in-play worlds are thin, cardboard cutouts". I don't think either of these characterisations is either true or helpful.
Sand boxes are being portrayed the same way... everything done in isolation and then the players are added later. They can be done that way but it is not the only way to do it.
But you can build a sand box with the characters molded into it. You have a lose shell (major cities, map with key geography, etc.) and as the characters are made their background fleshes out the world. "Where were you being a thief?", "What enemies did you form while working for the king?", "Who are you wanting revenge against?". The characters interests become part of the world (but not the only thing in the world). So the idea that pre-authored must mean the PC's are just bouncing around with no interest or connection to the world is seeing a limit of AP's and applying it to all pre-authored content.
Of course you can do all that - but the fact remains that the GM is putting forth a (limited) selection of Dramatic Needs for the players to select from. They might be ones that the GM has chosen to be of potential interest to the players - but they are still provided by the GM, not evolved through player actions as the game is actually played.
NOTE: I'm not saying that either of these is better - I'm just saying they are different. This is what makes a nonsense of the statements arguing that one method or another is the "best way to do it". There is no "it" - there are at least two "its". It therefore follows that there may be more than one "best way", since all the "its" are not the same.
It is definitely a different experience when you are playing. (one that as player I prefer). There gets to a point where coincidences pile up too much, where everything just neatly fits around a character too well. Sometimes a couple of drunk thugs are just a couple of drunk thugs.
Sure. But sometimes we have to take a break to recover from the hiccoughs, go to the "rest room" or think about what to get for dinner. Fiction is formed mainly while ignoring these things. It's not that stuff irrelevant to the story doesn't happen, it's just that time spent on it is time wasted (unless it has some particular purpose - red herring, contemplation break, chance to meet an interesting NPC or whatever).
There is also that I dislike the idea of rolling for the character to "get what he wants/something happens that he doesn't like". For some games it works fine (super hero games/ leverage/ Heist games). but the style of game I want to play isn't always at that removed scale. And that come down to choosing the system and approach that gives the game you want.
Yeah, I understand that, but it is instrumental in allowing the player free reign to define their own Dramatic Need. Without it the Dramatic Need will tend to be set by the world (and thus the GM), not the player. If you don't feel a need to freely define your own Dramatic Need, then this really isn't an issue.
What exactly are the Antagonists doing in the above version of the roleplaying. Do they not have Dramatic Needs? Are the the BBEG's completely 'reactive' beings with no agenda's of their own?
In a "traditional" adventure? The original Protagonist is the BBG, as I said. They have some ambition that they pursue that gets in the PCs grills - or at least, that's the idea. The players are expected to react.
So how does an adventure start, with PCs declaring their Dramatic Needs? i.e. I want to traverse the Plains of Dust; I want to open a College for Bards; I want to hunt a Vampire Lord...and the DM takes it from there?
More or less, yes. I can't speak for others, but as I see it the players just have their characters set out to achieve their Dramatic Need in the simplest way available to them. The GM then creates consistent, plausible antagonists as required to stop (or at least challenge) them doing so. In this type of play the antagonists are shaped by their interaction with the protagonist's dramatic need, but in order to stay plausible and consistent they may need to gain more facets if they are "in contact" with the PCs for any length of time.
That's one established description of story, unfortunately, it is only one, and misses a great swath of storytelling out there, and I submit that APs actually fit a different model:
Start with the Protagonist. Each player is their own protagonist, and this is, as you said, a character who is going to take up the Dramatic Need. However, at the start of the story, the Protagonist doesn't really have much of a Dramatic Need. Their life is going on basically okay, until you...
Add the Antagonist. This is the character(s) that provide the Dramatic Need - something the Antagonist is doing changes the world in a way that creates a Dramatic Need the Protagonist takes up.
The antagonist can also be created as a reaction to the dramatic need, but otherwise, yeah, this is pretty much what I meant when I spoke about the "villain being the initial protagonist". The GM, via the BBG, presents the players with a dramatic need (or several) by having villains act. The dramatic need becomes the essentially antagonistic business of stopping the BBG from achieving
their dramatic need.
I submit that this is actually how much heroic fiction is structured. Heroes don't fix what isn't broken - that's actually the villain's role, seeking an end and being willing to tromp over anyone to get there. Heroes are typically *reactive*. The antagonist must first break things before there the heroic Protagonist needs to act. Luke Skywalker's stated Dramatic Need was "get off this podunk backwater desert planet". His need to "become a Jedi like my father" only came up *after* Vader and the Emperor created a crisis via building the Death Star, backing Luke (and many other moral people) into a corner such that they need to act. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain American warns us that, "Every time someone tries to end a war before it starts, innocent people die. Every time." The need is a result of action in such cases.
Now, we could of course use a meta-structure to manage this, using a level of abstraction - we state that Luke's *real* dramatic need is to become a Jedi, but stipulate that the character doesn't actually know that at the start of the story. That works fine if you are a sole author, I suppose. But for role playing, this seems an artificial construction, stuffing a square peg into a round hole - you can do it, but the player then has an internal conflict over having to deny his actual need for a significant period of time. Things that set the player's actual agenda against the agenda stated in the narrative tend to be immersion-breaking constructions.
I'm not sure if you are trying to reinforce my post, here, or you think I'm saying something contrary to this? Sure, many narratives work this way. Pre-authored "plot lines" can also work this way - as I specifically said. But it's different from players creating their own characters' dramatic needs. Not "worse" or "inferior", just different.
With my construction, how pre-authoring and scenario design fit in becomes obvious - it is providing a series of large and small scale dramatic needs.
Now, again, the GM needs to have pretty solid grasp of the characters to provide such a series, or conversely, the player needs to be not terribly picky about what will provide a satisfying need. We do need to remember that not all players are even very good at creating their own Dramataic Needs out of whole cloth. I know several who, when told they can do *anything they want*, suffer from option paralysis.
Agreed; I touched on this, too. Some players are much happier picking from a selection presented to them than with complete invention - for a whole range of reasons. I wouldn't limit the explanation to option paralysis or lack of imagination or boredom or tiredness or anything else. There are plenty of reasons to want to be tempted by alternatives rather than have to "make your own fun".
Moreover, the player is asked to submit specific encounters and events that are relevant to their character's personal desires - a "personal arc". The *player* engages in some pre-authoring.
Consider that a moment, as we consider pre-authoring. We have been speaking as if it is only a GM-thing, but that's an over-generalization, and we ought to consider the implications of player pre-authoring as well. Are we going to contend that player pre-authoring will lead to not meeting player dramatic needs?
This is a good point, and I think it brings up the way in which this perhaps relates to the "DIP/DAS" dichotomy that was discussed at great length on the old RGFA boards.
"DIP" stands for "Develop In Play", and represents a style of play where players start out with charaters that are little or nothing more than a set of bare-bones stats and develop their characters and detailed histories and capabilities as play happens.
"DAS", on the other hand, stands for "Develop At Start" and represents a style wherin players think about and create a great deal about their character's history, desires and outlook before play begins. Players in this style of play might go so far as to author extensive character histories and describe networks of contacts in agreement with the GM.
In the end it was agreed (pretty much) that neither of these approaches is "better" - they are just different.
With "DAS" players I have no doubt that player-generated dramatic needs might be married with pre-designed setting and situation elements, if you are prepared to work at it and if the needs don't shift in play (as they can be prone to do). With DIP players, however, they will simply tend to get frustrated with pre-authored setting and situation if they wish to develop their own dramatic needs.
I don't think there is anything essential or naturalistic about players freely creating their own dramatic needs. In our own lives, dramatic needs frequently seem to be presented to us as a set of limited choices or as inescapable necessities. But it does seem that a very attractive vein of escapism might be available through the pursuit of an imagined world in which we
do have such freedom - even if it is only for one story out of the many that interweave to make up our lives. And the contention that free selection of a character's dramatic need somehow goes against the ethos that "a player should have no control over anything outside their own character" seems to me to be quite flawed - bizarre, even. I can think of vanishingly little
more integral and internal to a character than the adoption of a dramatic need.
