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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8082708" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I know that you were addressing [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] and that you’re mostly talking about D&D, but looking at other games in this instance can help illustrate how this can be done.In a past Blades in the Dark game, my players were a group of Hawkers, and they were peddling a top quality drug called Third Eye. They operated in Nightmarket, a district of the city where much of the commerce and trade takes place, and which is going through an infusion of “new money” and a bit of gentrification (this is all based on details offered in the book, but then expanded upon for our version of the city).I set up an initial situation for them....that two gangs were vying for control of Nightmarket; one was the current top gang and the second saw the district as a source of income to fund their gang war in another part of the city. Once that initial set up was established, along with the details of character and crew creation, the Crew already has some existing relationships, both good and bad. The players contribute significantly to those details, with the GM offering some suggestions or possible ideas here and there. Once that’s all set, the game world then becomes incredibly reactive. The PCs do something, and the setting reacts. Perhaps they piss off a rival gang. Perhaps they come to the attention of a powerful faction. Perhaps they forge an alliance with another gang to wipe out a third. With each session, the direction the game takes is more and more in the players’ hands. They need fewer direct prompts from the GM of the sort that exist in D&D; “the local mayor has heard of your deeds in the region, and he requests you meet him at his manor....” or “there among the treasure trove you see a parchment that when unfurled shows you a map of the valley beyond the mountains, with a Silver Spire indicated....”Instead the players decide what a given session is going to be about; “I’m tired of these Red Sashes....let’s hit them where it’ll hurt the most, let’s take over their luxury den...” or “the Grinders are too dangerous to trust, but also too tough for us to take them out at this point. But maybe that ghost we met last session would help us against them....”So it’s not that the game doesn’t progress from A to B to C and so on....it’s just that once A and B are kind of established, its the players that are determining what C is and what D is and so on. It’s just a different approach. It can be adopted to other games, though, at least to some extent. This approach has very much influenced how I run my 5E game. I have setting elements I’ve crafted, and I have those elements react to what the PCs do in order to help move the game along and prompt the players to decide what’s next. The result is, for me, that the game is the story of the characters. It’s their journey specifically, rather than “the story of the war against evil overlord, featuring the PCs”.</blockquote>

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