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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8285192" data-attributes="member: 42582">Especially common, in my experience, is a scenario assuming that the players, in playing their PCs, will treat a particular person as a villain more-or-less into perpetuity.It's not uncommon for a scenario to frame the PCs into some sort of conflict. The first real encounter in my 4e game had the PCs being ambushed while travelling on a boat along a river. (The scenario is from Night's Dark Terror - I recommend it, and 4e D&D handles it especially well, much better in my view than the B/X it was written for.) It is almost inevitable that the PCs will oppose this force with force, and in my prep I did get ready for the eventuality (eg preparing combat stats for the NPCs in question).Yesterday evening I was re-reading the harm and health rules for Apocalypse World and an example that Vincent Baker gives is of the GM declaring that Dremmer's gang (the NPCs) attacks Uncle's gang (Uncle is the PC) while the latter are out scouting. It's not inevitable that a firefight should ensue, but I think there's an obvious reason that Baker chooses this as an example of how gangs take and deliver harm; it's pretty foreseeable that a player's response to that situation might be to have his/her gang shoot back.A classic Prince Valiant scenario might be a NPC knight challenging a PC to a joust; or an attack by robber knights, or by an ogre; and these sort of scenarios are foreseeably going to lead the players to declare attacks in response.What I think is important - when it comes to playing to find out vs story advocacy - is what happens next? Can the PCs, after surviving the ambush, ally with their attackers? Or conversely, as happened in my Classic Traveller game, can they turn on their allies?And the can here isn't the can of in principle might this happen conformably with the game's rules? It's is this a meaningful option at this table in this game given this GM and how s/he approaches scenario design and adjudication? For a lot of published scenarios, the answer is no. One of the few I can think of where the answer is an unequivocal yes is Robin Laws's Demon of the Red Grove, for HeroWars. (There are also some Prince Valiant scenarios that allow a yes answer, but the typical Prince Valiant scenario isn't intricate enough for the issue to really come up.)</blockquote>

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