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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7572852" data-attributes="member: 82106">I will contrast this with some examples of what DID happen in the campaign where my dwarf had a goal of ruling his own kingdom:There was no presentation of any situations which would provide this as a pathway. The DM ran the Phandelver module, and located it in an area of a long-established campaign world that was at the edge of an existing kingdom. While this kingdom has been having a rulership crisis (in pre-existing metaplot from former campaigns set there) nothing about that was set as an opportunity for my character, in any sense. I was going to have to carve something out purely by creating a situation by dint of the character's actions. So he claimed the ruined bugbear castle from the module. From there the questions were really purely logistical and political. This is OK, but it didn't seem terribly dramatic. The character set out to create ways to get stuff into the area, blaze a trail into a richer area of land beyond it which could serve as a trade route, etc. There were threats, but he was never confronted with questions like "you can either build your castle or serve your family" or something like that. Later, after I had established the castle and some stuff around it, the DM's response was to take it away. Basically I came back from a trip one day and someone else had moved in! Start over from scratch. There's nothing wrong with losing something, but it was pretty much not a dramatic kind of loss at all, it was literally just "the DM giveth, the DM taketh away". Generously the scenario was structured as "take big risks to get your stuff back, or give up." Again, this isn't BAD, and might even be a way of putting pressure on the whole idea, but it definitely seemed like a more frustrating way of doing it than other ways might have been. I would have preferred to have had a choice to stake my castle on something and then deal with the consequences of losing it vs feeling like I was just back to ground zero and trying to get a castle all over again. Anyway, this is not to complain about how that game went, it was fun, but just to contrast with what might be done in a less DM-centered story-telling mechanics. That is to say, in -say- BW I expect that there is an actual rule that the GM doesn't take away the player's goodies unless they're staked somehow. This illustrates how integrating story oriented mechanics more deeply into games can provide better results. Likewise, DW would probably not lead to this sort of turn, the PC in question would be practically guaranteed to have at least some sort of 'defy danger' or something (I guess technically DW doesn't explicitly preclude this stuff, but the referee is supposed to be an advocate of the players, so it probably wouldn't IMHO).</blockquote>

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