Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6783648">Okay. That background is really helpful for clarifying (and I think maybe what is going on is a lot of us have diverging assumptions about what the point of play is when we are running or playing a game). So just to fill that in here, my own experience may shed light on my preferences. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s and experienced what you are referring to, I believe I follow (and at the very least, I am pretty sure I have a concrete sense of how you are using this term and definitely think it isn't something that I would use, or have an easy time implementing, in one of my sessions). I played those kinds of campaigns, pretty much bought into a lot of the GM advice up through 3E. Around the time 3E was at its height, I really started to experience frustration with the very pre-planned, path-driven type of adventure (the focus seemed to shift a bit from story to encounters, but it amounted to something similar in my experience, where a lot of adventures were designed around a flow of encounter sequences that each hit particular increments). I kind of felt like these two choices were mainly what was being offered and I didn't like it. Maybe that wasn't actually the case, but that is how it felt to me at the time. Basically as a player I felt like I was being walked through what the GM had planned, and as a GM I felt that I might as well just hand my players my GM notes and call it a night. I think I must have found an old hex crawl adventure or they reprinted one somewhere, and that got me thinking. I had also been experimenting now and again with much more open style and freeform GMIing approaches (where I prepped very, very little and just responded to things as they came up). I think for me, the turning point was picking up the 1E DMG again and reading through it. I honestly kind of did it for a laugh at first, because I remembered old school play from my early days being a bit hokey (mainly because my group was so young and we were applying it without much thought). But it actually answered a lot of my frustrations. I had learned to GM from the 2E PHB, and anyone familiar with that, knows a lot of the advice from the 1E book simply isn't in there (there is just less emphasis on exploration procedures). I wasn't that I read the 1E book and game away a Gygaxian GM who ran things exactly as described there, but those tools and guidelines really got me thinking in a much more back to basics approach that I built up on. What I found excites me as a GM and as a player is a sense that: 1) I don't know where things are going to go; there isn't a pre-planned sense of an adventure that has to pan out a particular way2) A sense that the world is separate from the Players and they are exploring it. Whether it is a dungeon, a mystery or a royal court, the experience from the player side is that of really being there and dealign with characters and places that have weight and feel real. 3) Things are not progressing to satisfy the GMs desire to tell a story or the player's desire to be in a story. That doesn't mean I avoid excitement, twists, etc. But it does mean I try to avoid patterns that make the players feel like they are heroes in a movie or book. So I don't fudge rolls out of pacing concerns, spotlight, etc. If I ever fudge, which is incredibly rare, it is only because the dice produce a result I strongly feel would be unrealistic.  Based on this, I am assuming fail forward would be an awkward fit for someone like me. But I have someone in my group runs games differently than I do, with a little more focus on things like spotlight and the cinematic, so I suspect he'd probably have more use for it than I would.You mention the players setting the stakes. Can you elaborate on this? That may be another major point of divergence. One of my big gripes with skills like Diplomacy in 3E was that players sometimes used them to set the stakes or direct the outcomes (i.e. "I use Diplomacy to get to the princess to marry me" where the player is framing the consequences of a successful roll rather than allowing the GM to do so....the wording can lead the GM to believe that a successful roll must result in the princess saying yes to marriage, even if the character in question simply wouldn't' or couldn't do that). It took me a while to figure out why this bothered me, but eventually that seemed like the cause.</blockquote>

Verification