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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8082303" data-attributes="member: 16814">Again, I encourage you to look into different games.  My Blades in the Dark game, for instance, I have absolutely no idea what comes next and won't until we sit down to play tomorrow night.  I do know that, though play, the PCs have a demon that has demanded a service (Blades demons are kinda like elementals), that the PCs are looking into a mystery involving a secret cult and some alchemical zombies, that one of the PC's good friends (a ghost, no less) has gone missing, that the gang war in the PC's neighborhood is about to end with the side they don't support on top, and that they need funds to improve their gang rank and so need to do a job that pays.  Those are all situations that occurred in play (except the gang war, which was a starting situation but has played out in play).  I literally have no idea which of these will feature in tomorrow's game, nor do I have any idea what will happen when they do.  That is because my job as GM in Blades is entirely reactionary -- I cannot introduce fiction until the PCs do something, and then am limited as to what I can introduce.  If they decide to deal with the cult, for instance, they tell me how they're going to do that and I can either agree or run a score.  If I run the score, they again tell me how it starts and what the goal is, and I present a starting situation based on that and the engagement roll and play proceeds.  So far, every one of the situations above has occurred in play, at the table, as a complication or consequence of a failed roll on the part of the PCs.  The cult started as a possible paying job (the PCs are theives) from a contact that, through play and failures, turned into an alchemical formula that turns people into possessed zombies of differing kinds and that now threatens things the PCs want directly.  I do not, and cannot, conceive of what the next letter is at all, and, if I did, the game would break because it's not built that way.Now, in 5e, I don't have the mechanical structures that Blades has to allow play to generate only at the table.  Prep is kinda baked in.  Also, the approach to D&D is more passive on the players part because they lack established authorities over parts of the fiction outside of their character, so that's entirely on the GM to create.  However, I can leverage my experiences in Blades and use things like skill challenges to replicate the kind of 'play to find out' that's part and parcel of games like Blades, at least in limited amounts.  So, my 5e game often features things where I had no idea what B or C or D would look like until we played it out.  Planning these things out is an approach you can use -- arguably the most common by far -- but it is not required.  That you continue to argue that it is doesn't display a truth that you've uncovered, rather it uncovers that you're not experienced in other approaches.  That's fine, you don't need to be -- fun is fun and can be had in lots of ways; there's no right way to have fun.  And, until a few years ago, I believed very much as you do.  It took some doing and a good dose of "let's assume that it's true that you can play that way, how would that work?" thinking.Not my Aboleth question.  I mean, to start, I my story features an aboleth in a Dwarven mine in the Outlands, a plane, not an Aboleth in a lake on the Prime.  Secondly, my Aboleth beat the players and made off with the treasure, it wasn't dismissed by a Suggestion spell.  So, yeah, this whole bit is incorrect.No, I did not do the same thing.  I didn't know if the Aboleth had escaped or where it was until we ran the skill challenge and those things were added due to failed checks from the PCs.  It could have been very different, even with the same number of failures if those failures had occurred in different places in the skill challenge.  That's because the fiction and what gets established is very much based on what things the PCs attempt in the challenge and how they succeed or fail at those.  So, every one of those tertiary NPCs, as you call them, occurred directly from play not planning.  And that is very, very different from the kind of planned encounters an AP creates, or planned things in a sandbox game.  Those things were created because of what happened in play.  A single die roll different would have resulted in a different result.It honestly appears, at this point, that you're retreating into an argument that things occur in sequence instead of your initial argument that things occur in a preplanned sequence.  APs are preplanned sequences, even if those sequences are broken into concrete pieces and scattered they're still preplanned sequences.  I'm presenting a game that doesn't have preplanned sequences -- that generates next bits based immediately and solely on thing that occur in play.  An AP cannot do this because it cannot anticipate what occurs in play.  Heck, just using the skill challenge framework I do explodes this argument of similarity.  But, to preserve your argument, it appears you're now retreating to an argument that things happen in sequence, regardless of how or when they're generated.  In essences, you've swapped from "This A happens, then this B happens, then this C happens..." to "An A happens, then a B happens, then a C happens."  This latter is trivially true.  I'm pointing out the former isn't necessarily correct, even if it is how APs and many, many games are structured (and, as you note, this is not a bad thing).</blockquote>

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