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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 8165235" data-attributes="member: 5636">First off if I read your post correctly, sorry for your loss. As for the resolution to your example, I am uninterested as a player or referee in wish fulfillment. I am interested in the experience as a player, I am interested in creating an interesting experience for my players to adventure in. By experience I creating a place with people with personalities, locales with details, and sometime natural events.For example my Scourge of the Demon Wolf is about a village and a region that suffered horrific attacks by packs of wolves lead by a demon possessed alpha wolf. Thrown in there is a conclave of mage, a village of medieval peasant with local clergy, a group of outlaws, and a band of wandering beggars.It is a situation with no specific resolution. If the player don't deal with the situation, then the pack will grow and all the groups mentioned above will be slaughtered. In the absence of the PC's presence this is the course of events that will play out. It plays out that way because the demon wolf is not only gained control of the wolves in the immediate region but incorporated packs from surrounding regions. It cunning and intelligent enough to allow its combined pack to survive and grow.The only group capable of dealing with this on their own are the mages and they are off in their own world doing their own thing and by the time they are aware of what going on it will be too late to save the other groups and possibly themselves or at least their conclave.This sounds all predetermined but it not, it only what could happen if the PCs were not there. Starting with the initial incident, the PC enter the region and find themselves in the midst of the situation. I run the playtest of adventure for over 14 different group. Luckily there were patterns  to be found among what the different groups did to deal with the situation. So that gave me more to write out than just the descriptions of the situation, characters, and locale.But even with those patterns groups continued to surprise me at how they resolved the situation. The last group I playtested the adventure even managed to resolve it without dealing with medieval village. While all the groups managed to resolve the situation successfully, a handful had major difficulties in doing so. Suffered frustration, character deaths and other negative consequences. A small number of other groups sailed through the adventure. Most had ups and downs as they dealt with the NPCs and the situation.What I do is little more than being a tour guide. Because themes and tropes arise of human experience. Rather than artificially and arbitrarily (even as a group decision) incorporate them I recreate the situations that give birth to them. And the core of it I figured out decades ago back in the 80s when I was known as the referee who let players trash his setting. Being able to have a lasting impact on the setting coupled with the knowledge that I will use what the players did in this campaign as the part of the background of the next campaign. As well as not caring what the players consider to be a lasting impact. Back when I younger the players invariably choose to become kings and princes. Now that I referee a broader age range it tends to be more varied. One ended with one PC getting a promotion in the Overlord's secret police and the other a blacksmith franchise. Another ended with a inn being built.The more the nuts and bolts of what I do, but that basic gist. In short I weave campaigns in which the players can exercise their vital powers as their characters along lines of excellence in a situation affording them scope. I don't promise success only that I will be fair.My view that rules are a detail to used as an aide to adjudicate something specific the players do as their character. Rules can be abstract at a high level like realm management or they can be narrowly focused as to resolving knocking a chalice out of the hand of a lich while fighting a muddy hillside in a thunderstorm. Either way I pick the rules that fit me and my group's interest and tolerance.I played and ran LARP events so I don't find rules governing role-playing particularly useful or desirable except as a form of shorthand description. What I ask is "What are you interested in playing?" Usually it starts out with a broad genre.Then I ask what you think of a,b,c,d, or e that fits with the above.Then I narrow it down from there. From that I create locales, and character that centered around that situation. For example if the players say "We all want to make City-Guards and try that for a campaign." I will then create the details of the City Guards, some aides for myself, some details I share with the players, and some details I keep for myself. Each players has their own background and know their place at the start of the campaign. Then play commence and we proceed from there. Since players are part of the organization a lot of the campaign is about fulfilling duties and following orders. But the character and those they interact with have lives and the complication is what leads to various adventures.I ran a campaign using GURPS with two PCs. They played criminals, members of the Thieves Guild in the City State of the Invincible Overlord. Basically just brutes. One thing led to another a couple of session in and they wound up killing the local gang leader when they were not supposed to. When the Guild Lieutenant came around looking for them, they killed him too.  At this point they decided what the hell and started working up the guild hierarchy one by one. Executed their plans quite well and more importantly they caught the guild in a way that left them flat-footed for a while. Finally they done enough that the guildmaster decided to call a truce and invite them in as lords of the thieves guild. The players did a lot of things right but what they didn't do is build up a following. I roleplayed the negotiations and was able to convince the players that they had a deal and meet with the guild leadership to formalize their place. They walked into his chamber and were killed. It was pretty much as brief and brutal as you imagined. Now I know players through the decades who would have not taken that well. But for these two players, when the final confrontation ensued they knew how they were played and that they walked into a trap. And death was the only outcome.Why was death the only outcome, because the player killed somebody who was important to the guildmaster. Done it a way that there no coming back for the NPC.Some would be critical of this. Say that as a referee I should have handled that confrontation differently. All I can say that the players had ample opportunities to choose different courses of action that would have led to a different outcomes. There was tipping point where they figured (wrongly in hindsight) to go for it all and they came up short. Mostly because to the end they were lone wolf operators for the most part.Finally it not a miracle thing I do as a referee. I had several players over the decade just not come back in the midst of the campaign because it was going in a direction that didn't interest them. For these players (and this doesn't include the players with personal problems) the fundamental problem is not them or me or the other players. It is that by necessity the broad direction of what the players do is by consensus. Sometime that consensus otherwise free any particular agenda is boring or uninteresting to an individual. So why should they use their hobby time to do something boring?</blockquote>

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