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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7804192" data-attributes="member: 16586">So when I talk about maintaining a heightened sense of risk, drama and danger I am mostly speaking to immediacy. I am talking about play that is intimately focused on this moment - right here, right now. A situation lays in front of the player characters that demands their attention. They need to decide what they do about it even if they decide to do nothing and the consequences of that decision will be felt immediately even if we have to use techniques like jump cuts to do it. What do you do right now in this moment?In this sort of play the GM has a definite agenda. They are presenting a situation with stakes the characters should care about. They are following the fiction, but not in quite a naturalistic way. The priority is to make the decisions players make for their characters as consequential as possible. You make a threat and follow up on it or if the characters succeed the fiction immediately changes in a consequential way. You bring it. You make sure the tension of the moment is real and legitimate.When I talk about exploratory play I am talking about an approach to running the game that is conflict neutral. Once the scenario is designed the GM is wholly an advocate for the fiction. We do not care what the characters are trying to accomplish, only what they actually do. We also do not care about things like immediacy of consequences or even if there are any consequences at all. The GM just follows the logic of the fiction based on what characters do in a completely naturalistic fashion. The players might do something today and not feel its impact until another 5 or 6 sessions. They might not even realize the impact they had.Now I am not saying techniques for each approach cannot be used within the scope of same game or within the scope of a session. I am saying that within any given moment something has to take priority. When you use techniques like telegraphing, jump cuts, flashbacks, leading questions, provocative questions, directly associating consequences to what the players were hoping to achieve you are not in that moment engaging in naturalistic exploration of setting and character. At other moments you might be. Blades in the Dark for insistence is mostly concerned with immediacy during scores where the player characters are attempting heists, engaging in tense negotiations, or trying to capture an important official. Outside of scores play is largely naturalistic, the pace slows down, and we just follow causality.You can very much combine techniques within the scope of a larger session, but the important thing to remember is that the more you lean one way the more you are not leaning the other. It's a bit of a tug of war. Naturalistic exploration depends on a GM who is a referee in every sense of the word. Their only agenda is fairness and accurately depicting the fictional world. Maintaining a heightened sense of drama depends on a GM who has a definite agenda in the way they present the fiction and resolve things. You can change this moment to moment, but as you do so you color the overall experience.One is not better than the other and the right mixture might very much depend on the group. For my part I value a play experience that has more naturalistic exploration than [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] does. I like to let conflicts appear more naturally, but once they do I tend to lean hard into the conflicts.</blockquote>

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