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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6306864" data-attributes="member: 4937">And once again, we have a definition of what it means to be an artful dungeon master which is situational and limited.   Unless your definition of artful dungeon master takes in to account the many styles of player and the many different aesthetic goals that a group of players can bring to the table - narrative, self-expression, discovery, fellowship, challenge, sensation, etc. - then you have a definition that is merely self-serving and self-centered.  You are basically saying, "This is what works for me, but I can't vouch for whether anyone else likes it."  That's fine, but I'd like to think we could talk about, "Given any group of players, what can the artful dungeon master do to ensure everyone has a good time."I disagree with the 'have'.  You certainly can have meaningful development and interaction by coming to an agreement about what the goals and priorities of the narration are to be, but that's hardly a prerequisite for having meaningful development and interaction.  It's just one path to the goal.Which actually has nothing to do with the actual goals and priorities of play any more than "We are going to be delvers in an ancient dungeon" as a premise sets the goals and priorities of play.  There is no reason to believe that you've necessarily done anything but change the drapes by saying, "We'll be a gang of pirates on the high seas", and every sort of conflict or goal or interaction possible in "We'll be a gang of pirates on the high seas" is possible in, "We'll be delvers into a ruined dwarf city."So?  That's hardly the point.  Even amongst a group of people who know and like each other, you'll have that player who is a power gamer, that other guy that loves amateur theatrics, that one players that just likes hanging out with friends, that other guy that sees every situation as an opportunity for mad cap hilarity, that one guy who just naturally gravitates to living out heroic fantasy, and that other guy who decompresses by being an amoral ruthless assassins with every imaginable vice.  Coming up with a theory that only serves the viewpoint of the guy who is 100% method actor is pretty useless in actual play.I'm not even convinced you know what conventions are needed to run random characters for a few hours of dungeon crawling are.  I certainly didn't until I spent a summer running games for a random ever changing cast of players.  After that, I opened up the 1e DMG and saw things I'd never understood before.  And I certainly agree there is no need to be slave to the conventions that requires, because it implies that you aren't conscious of why you are doing things and have become hidebound.  But I'd equally argue that this is true of being slave to generic non-solutions like, "Have them fail forward." or "No myth" or a bunch of other overly simplistic rules people try to promote as 'the answer'. But that's hardly the point.  The point is that a theory of good DMing has to encompass both your home game with players you've been with for 30 years and who all have identical aesthetics of play, and that random group of 12 strangers at a Con or local gaming store.   You have to be able to understand what your constraints are, what the goals of your players are, and how you can meet each of those goals without sacrificing (as much as possible) the other considerations.   To the extent that at first you can't necessarily know what goals your players have (they might not even know themselves), as a first strategy I think it best to try to meet a mixture of common goals like challenge, narration, discovery, self-expression and so forth.  You can then pull the levers as you discover more what your players need, providing of course you even know what the levers are.</blockquote>

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