Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6521543" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Hey isereth.  I've seen you post this in a few different areas.  Question for you if you don't mind (to generate conversation).  When I see those goals of play, I think something like:"...ummmm...I'm not sure I could have come up with something more generic, more milquetoast, more universally applicable if I spent a great deal of time and effort."I mean "to have a good time?"  And "to create an exciting, memorable story?"  That strikes me as akin to someone asking a coach what their gameplan is and having the coach deadpan "to score more points than the other team."  Well.  Yeah.Much more interesting and much more helpful is to dig deeper, to nail down specific play agenda, GMing principles, techniques and play procedures and contrast them with their alternatives.  Then we can know why this round peg fits in this hole while this square one doesn't.  And as a result, we can know, with precision, what we're trying to get out of play and work with the system rather than against it.A system that advocates "play to find out what happens" is very different than a system that advocates "tell the players a good story."  The former should push against you if you try to use GM force to railroad play toward your good story.  Further, it should work with you by having robust resolution mechanics and clear, authoritative GMing principles that facilitate an agenda of emergent story.  The latter will have a different setup and a different GMing ethos undewriting play procedures.Same thing with "push play toward conflict and escalate" versus "present an objective, internally consistent fantasy world for the players to explore at their leisure."Same thing with the GMing principles of "be a fan of the protagonists/PCs" versus "be an objective arbiter/referee."The goals of play should authoritatively break out how system, setting, and technique work together toward realizing those goals.  It should transparently speak on pacing, genre/theme expectations/constraints, player/GM authority, leveraging the off-screen and the metagame, and how the resolution mechanics/GMing techniques feedback onto the whole.  But, in truth, I think its pretty clear from all the Legend and Lore columns and all the podcasts (etc) that a non-authoritative voice (hence assuredly non-offensive) was precisely what they were looking for (unfortunately in my estimation) in their presentation of 5e.  The "skip the guards and get to the fun (the 4e analogue to the Vincent Baker imperative of 'at every moment, push play toward conflict')" ripple effect.</blockquote>

Verification