Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5586566" data-attributes="member: 8835">I think I see where my point is being missed.Forget gaming for a minute.  Let's talk real life.  Because gaming is just attempting to model real life, minus the boring stuff.My thesis is this, at any given moment in your life, while technically you have a multitude of actions you could take, many of those choices are self-negated and effectively non-choices.You are going to go to work every day, because you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay.  Just quitting for no reason is not something you would do, therefore it is not Choice.You are not going to Eric's grandma's house to murder her and take her stuff, because you are not a murderer.  It is not a Choice.  Even though you technically could get her address and go pay her a visit.When yet another pipe sprung a leak on Monday AND my AC went out, I had no choice not to fix it lest my water bill shoot through the roof, my house is destroyed by water damage and we die from the heat because I live in TX.Therefore, when the GM raises the new Threat, if he has designed it with your PCs in mind, you do not really have a choice to not deal with it.Any sane person who does not deal with their problems is a freaking idiot.  Seriously, that's what people with problems that they don't deal with are.  Now I suppose there's a corner case for the pacifist who won't resist a robbery and gets killed for his beliefs, but even there, that wasn't exactly a genius move.In my view, a PC who doesn't take a realistic response to a problem isn't engaging the game world realistically.Whether I am right or wrong, somebody with this view set is going to feel compelled by the GM to go solve the problem.  Because the alternative choices are unappealing.  And this is how a GM manipulates players into going his way.Because of that, I feel it is disingenuous to insist that "oh the PCs had a choice.  They could have let the evil empire rape their gramma."  Replace Gramma with something the player/PC cares about, and you have taken away their Choices.When the GM starts some big new external problem (like the OP's war), the players ability to choose what kind of goals they want to pursue gets narrowed down.</blockquote>

Verification