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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9254983" data-attributes="member: 20564">How I take the quote: "The only 'story' in RPGs should emerge from the combination of the referee’s obstacles, the players’ choices, and the luck of the dice."The Lord of the Rings would have been a very different story with a different cast in the Fellowship.  Honor, loyalty, belief, betrayal, friendship, rivalry.  It would not have followed the same path.We have the obstacles the DM has put forth, everything from Theoden's corruption to the Nazgul to Shelob to the Urak-hai, the vigilance of Sauron's forces, to Saruman and Sauron himself.  And there may have been other obstacles that the opposing forces (or rather, the DM in the role of them) had prepared that the party never encountered.EDIT: There were other obstactles the Fellowship never faced, Professor Tolkien wrote about them in some of his letters and articles.But then the choices of what the party to do came from them.  It was their agency that chose going through the Mines of Moria instead of encountering other challenges.  The party did not need to meet the Balrog, it was their choices that led them there.  Time after time, player agency wrote the story based on how they interacted with the world and the choices they made, with the opposition that the DM had decided was there.And that's how I read it.  And reading it that way I agree with it, strongly.  I admit I have distain for the type of pre-written module or adventure path that can only be traversed one way and players have no large meaningful choices.  (Which is not all of them.)  A DM can plan the campaign about the attempt to destroy the One Ring, or kill Strahd or whatever, without taking away the players writing the story of their choices dictating how the attempt is made, and if it is successful.Now, if a DM tells me "I'm running X" and I agree to join, as a good player I will try to follow the hooks put in front of me.  (And new DMs I cut even more slack.)  And maybe we choose to follow the expected path, but I expect any experienced DM to not try to railroad us in if we attempt to accomplish the goals or overcome the challenges in ways we come up with, regardless if the module explicitly expected it.  We had a hard time in Descent to Avernus where we were following chain of quests and it got up to one where we needed to give major help to some evil guy and some characters dug in and said "No" for moral reasons.  (That should be vague enough not to be spoilers.)  The DM admitted that the only other route was basically to discard a bunch of sessions of progress and follow some other quest chain.  We ended up going off the reservation at that point.I have walked from tables where the DM thinks they create the story by themselves.  Player choices need to matter, and are arguably the more important ones in creating the story.  Any story focuses on the actions of the protagonists - they are the ones that take the situation, take the challenges and opposition, and move through it.  The story follows them, not the foes, because they create it.  What events happen and how they play out is due to played choices, and to some degree the luck of the dice.So yeah, "The only 'story' in RPGs should emerge from the combination of the referee’s obstacles, the players’ choices, and the luck of the dice.".  The character's actions in response to the GM's opposition is what creates the story, with the dice as agreed-on arbitrators of uncertainty and luck.When you put it like that, it makes it hard to disagree.  Does player actions matter?  Do we respect the outcomes of the dice?  Then there really is no argument against it.  It requires the context, the challenges, and the goals that the GM has put forth, but that is not a story by itself.The story emerges from what gets played out on the table.Fin.</blockquote>

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