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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8285450" data-attributes="member: 16814">Again, you're mistaking the GM making a choice for curation of story.  You're not grasping what it means to curate story.  There's a big difference.Let's take an interaction with an NPC, a captive kobold.  The party is attempting to interrogate the kobold for information about the dungeon.  The kobold absolutely knows about some of the traps and other denizens, because they live here, so this information will be useful, and will allow the party to bypass a number of challenges.  The PCs succeed at the check to interrogate the kobold, and the GM now has to narrate the results.I have to make a decision as the GM here, but it's not so that any decision I make is story curation.  If I follow the success of the check, I would honor the intent and have the kobold reveal the information and then wait to see what the party does with it.  This may very well mean that the party now skips a number of challenges and so carries lots more resources into later parts of the dungeon.Or, I could feel that the party bypassing the challenges makes for a less interesting story, because I the final areas of the dungeon are designed for a low-resource party in challenge.  So, I kinda honor the check, and have the kobold start babbling at the top of it's lungs, screaming don't hurt me between talking of traps and denizens, and then say that this has alerted the denizens in the next room.  This means that I nominally honor the check, but in a way that makes that party still face at least some of the planned challenges and so preserves the overall challenge better.  Also, it's funny, I think.So, here you have a choice the GM has to make.  Of course the GM is going to make things up, but this isn't story curation per se.  Story curation comes in when the GM is making the choice based on a better story outcome specifically.   Everything the GM does and everything the players do will of course lead to a story you can tell of what happened, but if story curation is to have any value, it cannot just be all of this, and it hasn't been.  Story curation is about manipulation of the outcomes of a play loop in order to serve the GM's conception of what makes for a better story.</blockquote>

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