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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CandyLaser" data-source="post: 9469516" data-attributes="member: 7029413">I have been trying not to engage on this sort of topic, but against my instincts... here we go.Let's just start off here: it's the height of irony that you're asking for charity from others in interpreting what you say when you regularly, across multiple threads, refuse to grant it to others. I don't feel like I need to explain why a reader might take "casual" and "serious" to be opposed. You even allude to "casual" and "serious" being opposed in the third sentence of the quoted paragraph.Rest assured, though, that I will not take you to be an amazing wordsmith. If you are concerned that people are consistently misinterpreting what you say, and if this is a sincere confusion as opposed to trolling behavior, then I recommend you think about what you're posting and reconsider your phrasing and consider extending the same charity you ask for to others.It hardly needs to be said at this point, but the mode of play you're describing as "player lead" [sic] bears no resemblance to the sort of gameplay I see at my tables when I play games like Stonetop, Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, etc. Indeed, I've never seen anything like that at any table. Perhaps it's common where you play; I am dubious. So, this is just a blatant and severe mischaracterization of what "player led" games actually entail. I have never once sat down at a table where "each moment a player is just saying "DM make this for me" and the DM does without question." Moreover, I don't know where you get the idea that players aren't going to bring interesting ideas to the table. Giving everyone at the table a say does not turn players into autocrats and the DM into their servant. Quite the opposite, in fact - it means that everyone gets a say, which includes being able to push back on things that don't fit the narrative/the world/etc.I'm going to use my current game (Fellowship, another PbtA game descended from Dungeon World) as an example. This game makes collaborative worldbuilding central to its mechanics. The playbooks available to players are each connected to a people with the game - one player might be "The Elf" while another is "The Dwarf" and a third is "The Construct." As part of character creation, the players have to answer the question: what are your people like? So if you pick the Elf playbook, you get to tell the table what elves are like, what elven cultures exist in the world, and so on. In my game, we had one player pick the Construct playbook, and they said that constructs were common throughout the world, but that most constructs were pure technological automata. Their character was unusual in that they were magitech, as opposed to clockwork, and this infusion of magic is what gave them proper sentience. The rules of the game meant that it was up to them to determine what constructs were like, what set their character apart from other constructs, etc. Every other player did the same thing with their characters, and so we ended up with a world populated by nomadic ogres who don't die of old age and continue to grow until their bodies no longer could support them, nature spirits that bind animals together in a sort of hivemind, stealthy slime people, and so on. My role as GM was to ask them questions during this process. Everyone threw in ideas, but each player had the final say on what their characters and their people were like. And once something was established, it was established - it became part of the game world which others could use.Much of this happened during our first session, but it is an ongoing process. An example: at one point, the players were headed to a particular city that was being threatened by a villain. Along the way, they met an ogre messenger, who'd been sent to find the party and tell them of a threat to an ogre community. We'd already established that ogres are nomadic and that they grow larger and larger as they age, so I asked: "what's something that's culturally important to the ogres that might be at risk of destruction?" The player came back with: "The ogres have a Great Mother, the oldest living member of their kind. She's enormous, standing hundreds of feet tall, and she's phenomenally strong, but she's also blind, so most ogre clans send some of their number to serve as escorts as she travels." Given that, my role as the GM was to think up what was threatening the Great Mother, so I described how an army armed with fire weapons (which had been previously established by the ogre player as one of the things that could permanently kill an ogre) had trapped the Great Mother and her honor guard in a box canyon and were threatening their destruction, thereby putting a difficult choice in front of the party: they could ignore this threat and continue to their original destination, which would have meant the Great Mother's death, or they could go to her rescue, which would mean abandoning their original quest to defend a city from attack, OR they could split up and try to do both at once. They picked the third option, incidentally.Now, you might say, "Ah, but didn't it fall to you, the GM, to stat up the Great Mother, the army that had trapped her, etc?" And in some sense, it did - but "statting up" the Great Mother in Fellowship terms looks like this:Similarly, the army looked like this:Ranged, Burning, and Dangerous are tags with some minor mechanical weight, but mostly they do what it says on the tin - they set things on fire, at range, and they're dangerous to use.Since you asked for people to be charitable in reading what you wrote, I will close with this: there is nothing wrong with more traditional modes of play, where the GM is responsible for all or almost all of the worldbuilding, sets up the adventure hooks, and so on. I've both played and run such games and found it enjoyable and rewarding. I prefer games like Fellowship, but that's a statement about preference, not about superiority. But it does you, and the style of play you purport to practice, a disservice when you try to describe alternate modes in such misleading terms.</blockquote>

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