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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6804425" data-attributes="member: 177">Fair enough.  The game is certainly procedural, in the sense that TV shows are procedural.  To note, however, GUMSHOE doesn't require that the players actually figure out what the *real* procedure would be - the player doesn't have to know police evidence gathering procedures to succeed.  The game calls for the characters to be in the right place, and have the right skill to use.   In, for example, old school D&D play, we relied on player expertise, and if the player didn't explicitly state the character was searching, say, the legs of the bedstead, a secret compartment in one of them would never be found, but that's not required here.In GUMSHOE, if the character with Forensic Anthropology says, "I examine the body," that's enough.  They don't even really have to specify which skill they are using - so long as they have an applicable skill, and what they narrate is reasonable to include a particular skill, we can assume it is applied, and they get the appropriate information.Again, fair enough.  A person's preferences are what they are.  I wonder, though if much of what you are labeling as character-driven is really player-driven, which is not the same thing.  When I hear the phrase "character driven", I think of the literary sense, in which the piece is focused on in internal changes and conflicts in the character.  It is *not* character driven in the sense that the events are dominated and controlled by the character's choices, nor that the characters are in charge of their own destinies - you can have a character-driven story in which the characters are tossed upon the seas of fate, so long as the focus is on the internal life of the character, and how they feel and react to events.This is in contrast to the plot-driven story, in which the details of events are the focus of the piece.You can thus have a player-driven game, that focuses on the directions the player wants things to do, that is overall plot-driven... if the player is interested in making things external to his or her character happen.  Meanwhile, I can have a significantly pre-authored piece, that as fiction is character-driven, in that the pre-authoring is designed to yank the character's emotional chains, and produce conundrums the player reacts to.This latter, I find (definitely in my own, anecdotal experience) is true for those players who want to reach emotional immersion in characters.  The meta-level of thought required for player-driven play tends to keep them non-immersed.  So, the GM has to know where the PCs in coming from, and put things into play that resonate with their known issues.  A great deal of human drama and emotion arises from the fact that the universe is often unyielding and intractable, and that is hard to model with something that is highly player-driven, and thus yielding and tractable.I find the example of the spectrum of playstyles seen in this discussion interesting.A great many folks come down on the side that things like Fail Forward, or dice fudging, or other narrative influencing techniques are badwrongfun, for a variety of reasons generally amounting to, "a form of objectiveness to the game reality must exist down to the individual task resolution."  I often find myself in alignment with you in these discussions - play of the moment, to me, is generally pretty open to manipulation.But here, we find we part ways - you seem to take it to the other extreme.   While you don't call it badwrongfun for others, even having objective reality exist on the larger, longer scale is detrimental to your play experience, while I find the presence of a significant number of pre-determined facts to be useful.I think I know of an analogy I see in character creation...I know a great many people who, in character creation, want to be given a "blue sky" situation, where they GM says, "Make anything you want, the sky's the limit!" without any direction on where the campaign will go, themes, or the like.   I, personally, don't work well in blue sky mode.  When i am force to make a character in such situations, the results are... uninspired.  However, give me a framework, a few restrictions, and it is an entirely different story.  If creating a character were writing poetry, some folks are best in free verse (which I often really don't understand), but I am a master of the more structured haiku and sonnet forms that most folks find too restraining.</blockquote>

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