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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5477216" data-attributes="member: 26473">I'd enjoy playing Athos, too, but, for me, even better than playing Athos is becoming Athos in actual play.If I came across as presenting that as objective fact, it's certainly not my intention. My views are my views based on my experience and my preferences - and yes, my biases as well - but I never assume they're universal to all gamers everywhere.That said, it is my considered opinion that when players are 'writing hooks for the gamemaster to use' or asking the referee to invent allies and rivals instead of creating them as a consequence of in-character action, that is a passive approach to playing a roleplaying game. If that's controversial, so be it.My personal preference is for drawing on actual memories, not ad-libbing memories of things that never happened, and if it takes a few game-nights to get to that point, then I believe that's a worthwhile trade-off.As long as the player has "Contact: <a href="http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/cyrano/section2.rhtml" target="_blank">Ragueneau</a>" on his character sheet, we're golden."I'm going to talk to people in my old neighborhood," isn't the same as, "I'm looking up my old friend."The adventurers in our game are a Musketeer, a bureaucrat, and a spy; they know dozens of people, from their landlady at the Black Stork Inn to other soldiers in the company to lawyers and magistrates at the justice ministry to theology students (the spy's alternate identity) and professors at the Benedictine college in the Latin Quarter.If the players want to make one of those acquaintances a friend to one of those characters, in the sense of someone on whom they can depend on as a reliable resource, then they need to work at it in actual play; summoning up 'old friends' in the middle of the game from a line of fiction is right-out.Thank you very much, Janx - I really appreciate that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I've used the analogy that my game is like a dungeon crawl, with npcs as rooms and their relationships as hallways, stairways, and occasionally chutes or secret passages. The adventurers 'explore' the world by working their way through this network of relationships - they can even teleport a bit, in the sense of identifying a room they want to visit and going directly to it without crossing the intervening passages, though this is somewhat more challenging without the benefit of working through the dungeon.I find this set up does a nice job simulating the nature of personal power relationships in both 17th century France and cape-and-sword fiction, but what I've said about character backgrounds pretty much holds true for other games I run as well; of the games I've run in the past, the one where you are most likely to get away with, "Do I know anyone in this town?" is Traveller, in part because there is a rule for handling that question based on the character background generated in play.It may strain your credulity that significant relationships from a character's past don't make themselves felt in actual play; it strains my credulity when friends and enemies of the characters are popping up in convenient places and times. Moreover, as I mentioned with respect to Star Wars, in my experience this dependence on 'gotcha!' conflicts out of the character's background fiction reminds me of so many really dreadful stories and movies I've read or seen over the years - it's so mind-crushingly banal.Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we're playing a game, and as such there really is an actual, completely real bright line between before-the-game-begins and after-the-game-begins. I think that line matters, and in my experience too much out-of-game thinking can distract from actual play. Unless it is attached to specific rules governing character creation, background fiction is a wholly out-of-game creation and from what I've seen since I started doing this thirty-four years ago, the more the players are focused on making things happen in actual play as opposed to outside of actual play, the more enjoyable the game is.So I don't think I'm hobbling my game at all by creating an environment in which building relationships supercedes inventing them.</blockquote>

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