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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5477235" data-attributes="member: 3820">That is awesome when it happens. Yet the trick to Athos is that he has some aspects that are deeply personal, based on events that would logically involve only himself and the GM. I feel that the way to best become Athos would require sufficient one-on-one time that it winds up being very similar to talking backstory over lunch before the game starts. Sure. I was only saying that it doesn't surprise me that it's controversial, because not everyone agrees on just what counts as "passive." Yeah, I basically disagree. I honestly don't see collaboration as passivity: the player's taking as active a stake in the world, it merely takes a more metagaming form than straight-up play. Which has its disadvantages, but for people like me, also clear advantages. Sure. I happen to like both; the ad-libbing memories of "things that never happened" (which is, I figure, a paintbrush that comes awful close to describing the entirety of roleplaying) flexes a different set of creative muscles, and provides a dialogue that's different than the "I create, you interact" dialogue. See, now here I agree, but I lay the problem at the foot of melodrama rather than the concept of background elements arising. There's nothing that prevents painfully trite 'gotcha!'s from arising when, as you say, the Baron de Bauchery abducts someone you met last week rather than someone you knew of old. It's the context, and possibly the foreshadowing, that makes or breaks each one. This doesn't match my experience, but I'm willing to attribute this to the fact that I play with old friends, co-workers, relatives and my wife (who is a combination of the former three, come to think of it). Outside of actual play is something that happens outside of actual sessions as well: we talk over lunch breaks, at Sunday hey-let's-meet-up-for-burgers, and of course my wife and I have all kinds of opportunities to talk about world-building, character relationships and the like, from the morning commute to trying to fall asleep at night. We have more time to game without formally gaming than we do to actually sit around the table: thus, we get more done if we use it.</blockquote>

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