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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5119809" data-attributes="member: 18253">Really good food for thought and applicable to my own way of playing. First off on the blog quote (not re-quoted here), I don't think it is critical to have a creation story to have a good campaign setting but on the other hand, I can't seem to create my own settings without one. It really helps define the world for me and unroll what has happened since then. So I'm personally all for them although there are plenty of good settings without them. As for your specific question, the more serious gamers the better for me since those are the ones who will appreciate the setting and help drive the story more. I've always had a mix of casual and serious players. While my players are nearly always skilled in the D&D rules, they often include a significant element that really is not going to give any out of game material any thought at all. I really enjoy it when the players are serious enough that they will help create content. Worlds are big places; always good to have help be it the player's holdings or just a new spirit or group in the world of interest to the player's backgrounds. I always cut players a lot of slack if they choose to invest some time in the world with some out of game work. In general, with the one serious gamer, I tend to go for more ref-driven story because a single strong player is problemmatic in several ways: for one, he might not always be "on" that night and willing to pick things up- one too many beers, a hard week, whatever, we all have those nights. But also, if I rely too much on that player, it can create balance issues with the other players who might feel they aren't getting as much attention. Yes they aren't putting as much in but still, why raise the issue? With multiple serious players, I tend to let the players drive things more. Once they make their intentions clear, I still help present "story" elements, I don't do real sandboxes any more (mostly because I don't think we meet often enough to make this really work) but I let the players get immediate and obvious reward for their commitment to the game world by continuing to engage them with choices large and small. As to co-ref'ing, I often do it but usually just with one other player and we spend a lot of time making sure we are on the same page. One interesting recent experience on serious versus casual players- sometimes the difference between serious and casual is what you the ref make available to them. A friend just finished a campaign that was a lot of fun but was fairly linear by design and didn't have much setting material for us to dig into. We had a new player in the group who was good but I pegged as a casual player. When I prepared a fair amount of material for the campaign that we are about to start, I figured only my co-ref would read it and the other players would never spend time on it. To my surprise, the player I had pegged as casual read all the wiki pages, better even than my co-ref. This has come up on other threads- good, accomodating players will work with what they are presented. In a more linear campaign with the referee driving, they can have fun but will become more passive and let the ref drive. Presented with enough information to make informed decisions, they will become more assertive.</blockquote>

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