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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6683663" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I was falling asleep last night, in my head I was drafting a response to [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION], and more generally to the GNS strand of this conversation. I don't have time to type it up now, but what you say here touches on part of what I was thinking of.(1) It seems to me that the more a GM is adapting the fictional content that s/he is authoring to the particular choices of the players (including PC builds, action declarations, etc) then - everything else being equal - the less sim the game, and the more likely it is either gamist or &quot;story now&quot;.As a concrete illustration, on many threads on these boards over the years I've read posters talking about writing up an adventure before the players have brought along their PCs. Whereas I prepare in relation to the PCs the players have built (or, in the case of my 4e campaign, at the beginning of the campaign I instructed the players to build PCs which had a reason to be ready to fight goblins, given that the first adventure I was preparing involved a goblin raid on a homestead).(2) My experience of GM responsiveness to player cues is different from yours - it's not the player's creating, because their cues are mediated through the GM's own interpretations and determinations. Plus there is the roll of the dice - if the PCs go into the first tavern but fail their Streetwise (or Circles, or whatever) test, then instead of the NPC they're looking for something goes wrong. I think that's a type of discovery, mutual between players and GM.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6683663, member: 42582"] As I was falling asleep last night, in my head I was drafting a response to [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION], and more generally to the GNS strand of this conversation. I don't have time to type it up now, but what you say here touches on part of what I was thinking of. (1) It seems to me that the more a GM is adapting the fictional content that s/he is authoring to the particular choices of the players (including PC builds, action declarations, etc) then - everything else being equal - the less sim the game, and the more likely it is either gamist or "story now". As a concrete illustration, on many threads on these boards over the years I've read posters talking about writing up an adventure before the players have brought along their PCs. Whereas I prepare in relation to the PCs the players have built (or, in the case of my 4e campaign, at the beginning of the campaign I instructed the players to build PCs which had a reason to be ready to fight goblins, given that the first adventure I was preparing involved a goblin raid on a homestead). (2) My experience of GM responsiveness to player cues is different from yours - it's not the player's creating, because their cues are mediated through the GM's own interpretations and determinations. Plus there is the roll of the dice - if the PCs go into the first tavern but fail their Streetwise (or Circles, or whatever) test, then instead of the NPC they're looking for something goes wrong. I think that's a type of discovery, mutual between players and GM. [/QUOTE]

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