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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9472068" data-attributes="member: 6785785">It’s not just random improv. Again… you’re ignoring what people are telling you and you’re shooting down your own flawed idea of how these games work.As I said… in my game of Stonetop, there’s a map of the town that gets filled out by the group. There’s a map of the region that shows where other settlements are. There are lists of NPCs and locations for those settlements. Another game I ran not long ago is Spire: The City Must Fall. This game takes place in a very detailed setting… the mile high city of Spire… with distinct districts filled with NPCs and factions of all kinds. The setting actually has more material than I’d say any group could really ever use. That these details are already set does not prevent players from being able to add to them. This can happen in many ways. For example, as part of character creation, any Knight PC must choose a squire. This NPC is named by the player, and they decide the squire’s outlook. This is not random. The Knight character also has the ability called “Pub Crawler” reflecting their association with pubs (Knights in this setting are sworn to pubs rather than lords) and once per session, he can declare that there is a pub nearby, and that he knows the owner. The player gets to decide this. The GM gets to decide how the owner of the pub feels about the Knight. Again… none of this is random.Games other than D&D accomplish these kinds of things in a variety of ways.  Okay, well that pretty much says all that we need to hear. I don’t know what you mean by “makes sense in our reality”. I think you mean “appears to work as our reality does”… but if so, I don’t see how that doesn’t apply to the kinds of games I’m talking about. Because the key word there is “appears”; no game actually functions the way our world does. I highly doubt that. I mean, most DMs don’t tend to have characters in the traditional sense. But they have tons of NPCs that they may love. They have the world orthe setting itself. I’ve seen plenty of folks on this board admit that their setting is more important than the characters, and that they actively keep that in mind during play.  I expect you also feel that way. So no… I don’t think the DM is above skewing things based on their personal preference. What random games? People have been citing specific games. I’ve mentioned Stonetop and now Spire. [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER] has mentioned Ironsworn. [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has talked about Burning Wheel, and alsi shared a bunch of free resources for several other games. These aren’t mythical games beyond the knowledge of mortal men. They are available and well known. I don’t care if you like it. When I see you talk about railroading, I may indeed say “I’d hate it”.But what you won’t see me say is that railroading isn’t a thing.No, they don’t. There isn’t a mystery. It’s pretend. At most, we can say you’ve created a puzzle of some kind and the players may solve the puzzle. They do so by asking the right questions of you at the right time. They prompt you to reveal the story to them. It’s a well known and widely acknowledged form of play. I didn’t misunderstand at all.</blockquote>

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