NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6438071" data-attributes="member: 42582">Nonsense. Plenty of GMs have sat down to run games creating material on the spur of the moment - whether using random generation tables, or just making stuff up because it seems like fun.On page 169ff of his DMG, Gygax presents a system for random dungeon generation. He says "the system requires time, but it can be used directly in conjunction with actual play."There's no mental bible there. And if the GM departs from the tables because s/he has a better idea occur to him/her spontaneously, or as a result of something suggested by a player, s/he is not breaking any rule.Here is an exract from [ul=http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361]one of my favourite pieces of GMing advice[/url], though it is about NPC personalities rather than dungeon geography, and its author (Paul Czege) probably has in mind something a bit more high-brow than the FRPG games that I GM:[W]hen I'm framing scenes . . . I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . . t [is] my job to find out what the player finds interesting about the [player] character. I know what I find interesting. I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. And . . . the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.There's no "mental bible" there beyond some basic conceptions about what the player finds interesting about his/her PC, and what the GM thinks might be an interesting way to put pressure on that.Playing like that mightn't be your preferred approach, but it is not failing to be an "equally good" GM. From my perspecive it is a prefereable GM.In Burning Wheel, a player who wants his/her PC to meet a helpful NPC declares an action in character, too, and uses a character resource (Circles ability) to see if a helpful NPC turns up (eg the player, playing the wizard Jobe, who is a member of a sorcerous cabal, declares "I send out word that Jobe the Blue is staying at the [such-and-such] inn and would like to meet with Jabal the Red".)This doesn't mean that it is not player authorship - when the above event happened in a session of BW that I GMed recently, this was the first that anyone at the table had heard of Jabal: the Circles check failed and so instead of Jabal inviting Jobe to an audience, he sent Athog - a thug - to tell Jobe and his friends to leave town.In my 4e game, in the very first scene in the very first session, the player of Malstaph Empel (at that time a human wizard) was in conversation with an NPC who wanted to hire the PCs to help take some horses to be sold. In the course of the conversation, Malstaph (as played by this player) asked the NPC if he knew Malstaph's uncle so-and-so. This was an action declared in character, deploying a character resource (basic abilities to think and talk).Nevertheless, it was the first that anyone at the table had heard of uncle so-and-so. It was an episode of player authorship.In an OGL Conan game, I can imagine a player whose PC has to get into the second story window declaring "I look around the alley and, noticing some boxes, start piling them on top of one another" - and the player spends a Fate Point to make it true-in-the-fiction that the boxes exist. The boxes only come to light as part of an in-character action declaration.The fact that something is established by in-character action declaration doesn't tell us whether or not player authorship is involved.This is no different in any RPG. When the player in Burning Wheel, or the player in 4e, decides that Jabal, or the PC's uncle, is part of the campaign world, of course they existed all along from the point of view of the setting.When a player in OGL Conan uses a fate point to declare the existence of the boxes, in the fiction the boxes existed all along.This is not a point of distinction between a "trad RPG" and a "storytelling game". Player authoship is about who gets to author the gameworld content. It is not about the metaphysical status of that content from the point of view of the gameworld.No one upthread said that. Both [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] have been taking it for granted that the GM always has a veto.And I've been talking about the GM introducing the boxes because the players ask about them.By "reason" there you mean ingame reason. But that doesn't tell us about the out-of-game reason. Ingame, the most likely reason the paladin's warhorse is with the evil fighter is because the evil fighter hopes to tame and ride it. But everyone at the table knows that the reason the GM has authored this particular situation is so that the paladin can win his/her warhorse.In my D&D game, the reason there are Orcus cultists in Threshold is because they are hoping to sacrifice the life of the Baron to their dark lord. But everyone at the table knows that the reason I put Orcus cultists there rather than, say, Zehir cultists is because 3 of the PCs are Raven Queen devotees and, therefore, sworn enemies of Orcus.Once the GM decides to introduce story elements based on signals sent by the players - whether in building their PCs, or playing their PCs, or just kibbitizing in the course of play - the players are exericsing authorship. Even if final authority - be that primary authority, or the authority of the veto - sits with the GM.I don't understand why you think it can't. In the session of Burning Wheel that I mentioned above in this post, a player introduced the NPC Jabal the Red into the setting, as a senior figure in the sorcerous cabal. I decided that Jabal lived in a tower, what it looked like, and who was in it. As it happened I made up the tower's appearance msyelf, but one of the NPCs in it was the wizard Vincenze from the Penumbra d20 module Maiden Voyage. Player authorship wasn't an obstacle to that.</blockquote>

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