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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 6095731" data-attributes="member: 6688858">[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]As I said, I don't think the actual advice in the article is bad. I'm criticizing the intro:A      campaign needs to earn the players' respect if it has any  chance of survival. Too many potentially awesome campaigns get ripped to  shreds by disaffected and disenfranchised players, and for good reason.    In a few weeks, I'll be traveling to Boston for PAX East, and I  guarantee there will be DMs in attendance whose campaigns have been  turned into chew-toys by players driven to obnoxious behavior. Are your  players doing their utmost to sabotage your campaign and make your life  behind the DM screen a living hell? Are you players so apathetic to the  events of your campaign that they'd rather kill time in a tavern — or  set it on fire — than chase a quest? If the answer is yes, I have a good  guess as to why: Your NPCs aren't doing their jobs very well. I would respect this article 10x more if he said "or you know, maybe they're just being dicks or they're not interested in heroic play no matter what you do. But if you think it might be your NPCs try this..."We talked about the DMs on the Critical Hits blog in the first scene framing thread--that's where I'm coming from here. This seems right out of that DMing school. It's 100% assumed that if something's not working it's the DM's fault. I think when players become more active influencing the story of the game, there should be a concomitant increase in emphasis on how players can and should exercise that power well. Otherwise I think you've got a recipe for excessive DM stress, boom or bust sessions and confused handwringing over how to suck the players into the story but without railroading them, without defining what railroading means and why it's bad. That whole complex.My interest in these discussions about how best to run a story-focused game is mostly theoretical. My bg is that I read the Forge essays a few years ago. When I ask why player choice is so important it's not a rhetorical question, I'm interested in how people would answer that.I'm aware that I tend to talk about different styles of play in black & white, idealized terms, without really looking for deeper connections. I'm not trying to pigeonhole anybody or any game. I'm flexible but I like the clarity it provides for me at this time.I agree that movies and videogames do passive story experience better. I am skeptical that active story experience is reliably achievable without the players losing at least some immersion (immersion in this sense meaning being able to play without any consciousness of the fact that the quality of their roleplaying contributes to the overall story of the game and matters to other people).I think it is reasonable to expect the players to "fake it until they make it", if the PCs are going to be the protagonists right from the beginning of the game before the players are sucked into the setting/story. That's what I would expect. To an extent that goes beyond abiding by the 'social contract' of the game.I dont mind -- you've convinced me to dl and read the free intro pdf. I think it's the first couple of chapters.</blockquote>

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