Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7804162" data-attributes="member: 42582">Obviously [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] has his own views. But for my part, by heightened drama in RPG I would think of the sorts of things that happened in my Prince Valiant game yesterday: the PCs, having taken a castle at the end of the previous session, had to make a choice about who would become the next duke; they also had to decide what to do about the peasant army they had led; when a rival force arrived to relieve the castle, they had to negotiate with its leader; they also had to decide how to deal with the fiance of that leader, who was fleeing from him and accusing him of treating her cruelly; when the duke they had supported died from being shot by a treacherous arrow, they had to decide what approach to take to his sister who would succeed him; and this was complicated by the fact that one of their number had been smitten by the fleeing fiance after helping her into the castle by scaling a rope, it being impractical to lower the drawbridge in the face of the approaching forces.In terms of events and tone, this is comparable to a light drama with a few comedic and soap-operatic elements. From the point of view of GMing techniques, this is reasonably similar to Apocalypse World or similar games, although with different tropes and a much lighter and less edgy tone. That is, there is a lightly-sketched backstory (in my case, drawn from the integration of four "episodes" (ie scenarios) found in the core rulebook for the game plus the Episode Book - A Prodigal Son - in Chains, A Woman in Distress 2, and A Challenge from a Kinght 3) which includes NPCs and their motivations; and that backstory has been established, and is presented, in such a fashion as to compel some sort of response from the players via their PCs. That compulsion is achieved by having the backstory and NPCs press upon matters or motivations that have been established by the players for their PCs.This is not exploratory play. The players aren't exploring the gameworld - ie investigating it and learning its content. The GM is not presenting the gameworld in response to moves made by the players trying to learn what it contains. To put it in other words, the gameworld that is established and narrated by the GM is not neutral vis-a-vis what the players have their PCs do, and is not neutral vis-a-vis the goals players establish for their PCs. And there is no management of time, nor random encounters, in the fashion that are well-known in D&D play. The cutting from scene-to-scene, the establishing and management of consequences, and the presentation of new challenging events (like the arrival of the enemy force to relieve the castle) is established on the basis of narrative pacing concerns, not in a way that interacts with a resource management game that establishes player-side costs for engaging in exploration.Of course it is possible to establish backstory, and narrate it, and to manage ingame time and the threats of encounters, in a way that is neutral vis-a-vis player action declarations and player goals established for their PCs. Moldvay gives advice on how to do this in the Basic rulebook; Gygax gives slightly different, and perhaps not quite as robust, advice along the same lines in his DMG. This will enhance exploratory play. But it will reduce drama in the sense I'm talking about.</blockquote>

Verification