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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6806330" data-attributes="member: 42582">I see this as analogous to the point I made upthread about extrapolating to fictional facts that have never been authored, by working within the context and constraints provided by what has been authored.In your description of the pre-authored character-driven game you still talk about the player reacting to the challenges into which the GM frames his/her PC.Unless those reactions are what I would call mere colour - the player emotes his/her PC, but doesn't actually declare action resolutions that both express that emoting (and so would be different were the emotions different) and shape the direction of ingame events - then we have something that is, to at least some extent, player driven.In the "pure emoting"/"mere colour" variant, I see two issues. One is a matter of taste, and so maybe not of any consequence to anyone but me: generally I don't find play where the players' emoting of their PCs makes no difference to events very satisfying. An exception is a well-run Cthulhu one-shot, where the emoting is fun (as you play out your PC's baltherings to Nyarlathotep, or whatever it is) and the play of the game is significantly about generating that colour. And even in these, often one's final choice for a PC might change the way in which the world comes crashing down as a finale.The second issue is more practical: if the player's choices for his/her PC don't shape events in a significant way, then unless the GM is an incredibly engaging author there areincreasing prospects of a gap opening up between what the GM has in store for the PC, and what will actually move the player who wants to be immersed in his/her PC. I have seen this happen more than once in highly GM-driven, pre-authored campaigns.Turning these concerns into a positive statement about RPGing: the scope for the player to choose (by way of immersion or inhabitation of the character) how a protagonist responds to the challenges s/he is confronted with, and then have those choices both reinforced and put under the microscope by the framing of new challenges, is something that RPGs have that seems fairly unique to me. Turning the RPG into just another device for the players to hear someone else's story seems not to engage with that distinctive feature of RPGing.I know the above has been framed in strongly contrasting/absolute terms, and as you say actual play in many if not most cases will involve mixes of approaches and techniques. That's even true for my BW game: I am using my GH maps (I think I have all of them from the early 80s through to the 3E Gazetteer), without worrying too much about minor variations across eras. So when one of the PCs has, as part of his backstory, knowledge of a ruined tower in the desert foothills we (the player and I) are committed to locating that tower somewhere on the Abor-Alz map.So I'm not intending to advocate for a technique in any sort of purist or absolutist fashion. It's more that I'm trying to explain how a certain approach actually works in practice, why it has some merit, and (most importantly) why the frequent identification of a "real, living, breathing campaign world" with a very heavy dose of GM pre-authorship is a fallacious one. You can have the former without the latter.</blockquote>

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