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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greg Benage" data-source="post: 6812122" data-attributes="member: 93631">Of course the world can have some effect on them. As I stated explicitly in the section you quoted, part of the DM's job is to adjudicate the outcomes of their interactions with the world. But how, when, where and why the players interact with it is all them, and therefore, ultimately, so is "what happens."I mean, even if you don't prefer this style of play, it shouldn't be this incomprehensible. DM: You're in the Keep. The Caves of Chaos are rumored to be up the road to the northeast. There's a swamp over thataway rumored to be the domain of degenerate lizardmen. There's forested mountains to the north; they're teeming with brigands, so the locals say, and the bandits often raid along the road. What do you do?And then you play freakin' D&D! The players decide where they go and what they do and at what pace. There's no predetermined or even pre-seeded "story" in the narrative sense, and certainly no narrative structure, pacing, or other techniques to manage how the PCs do their thing. The DM has created the environment (or in this case, purchased a module) and the players go explore, interact with and plunder it. The players decide how many encounters they want to face, whether to try to camp in the dungeon or head back to the keep, whether the "tension" is too high or too low or just right. If they want more "tension," they go looking for trouble -- maybe try those stairs leading down. If they want less, they pull back. They're in control. None of it is managed by the DM.Some players like this style of play. So when you offer guidelines on how the DM can manage pacing, or structure the narrative, you shouldn't be surprised when someone pipes up with, "This is cool, but it doesn't fit my style of play." That's because it doesn't, and pretending there's really no difference in the styles of play isn't going to be very convincing or helpful.I say this as someone who is prepping a Primeval Thule campaign that is going to be heavily narrative to better emulate the sword-and-sorcery genre. Your ideas have been helpful to me. I'm going to flat-out tell the players we're emulating genre and each adventure (story/episode) is typically going to have three acts. You get a short rest in the interlude following Act One, another in the interlude after Act Two, and a long rest recharge when the story is resolved. That "story" might be one hour, one day, or one week. You've given me some helpful ideas to think about.But it's going to be radically different from my B/X Stonehell game; approaches that work for one style of play would be disastrous for the other.</blockquote>

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