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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6808936" data-attributes="member: 42582">What's your threshold for, or measure of, GM force?In my own case, I can tell you absolutely that I spend a lot of time thinking about the game, the characters and what may happen in the game, for both my 4e and my BW campaign. I come up with ideas for antagonists, possible locations, situations etc.To give a concrete example from my BW game:After the session in which the PCs escaped the orcs in the desert and took shelter at an oasis with a friendly naga guardian, I thought that I wanted to use a dark elf in the game. (Looking at the chapter on Maeglin in the Silmarillion even led to me re-reading the whole of that book!)In the next session, when the PCs travelled to the ruined tower, I used the dark elf as a failure result for two checks: a failed orientation check led the PCs to a waterhole which had been recently fouled. Investigation of the excrement suggested that it was elvish. Pursuing the perpetrator led to a brief encounter with the dark elf, who escaped (but lost his knife when he through it and the PCs kept it). Another failed check (I can't remember what, now - maybe the failed attempt to track the dark elf) meant that when they got to the tower the dark elf had also got there first, and hence had had a chance to fill the well with rubble.In the session when the PCs left the tower, I also used the elf - he dropped a deadfall on the PCs as they were walking through a defile in the Abor-Alz. And this was when it was revealed that he was wielding the nickel-silver mace.That the dark elf would have the mace had already been anticipated, though, by the player of the mage: in an email following the session where the mace wasn't found, that player conjectured that the mace would be in the hands of the dark elf.To me, this seems to be a GM doing his/her job. It's my job to manage the fiction and, of particular relevance to this particular matter, to come up with consequences for failure and to frame the PCs into challenging situations.With this concrete example in mind, can you explain the relationship you see to pre-authoring? To me, it makes a difference that the initial encounters with the dark elf and his filthy deeds were triggered by failed checks; that the mace only came into play at all because a player wrote it into his PC's backstory and Beliefs; that the ruined tower came into play at all only because the same player had it written into his PC's backstory; that the dark elf was intended to (and, in play, did) provide material for the elven ronin PC to play off his Belief that he "will always keep the Elven ways"; etc.I'm not sure how this would all have been pre-authored, though. If the checks to move through the desert had succeeded, for instance, then there would have been no occasion to introduce the dark elf into play in the way that I did. I might still have used the dark elf as an antagonist with the deadfall - but that itself was triggered by the players deciding to have their PCs leave the tower.I'm very unclear in what respect you are suggesting that pre-authorship vs "just in time"/"story now" made no difference here, in respect of the balance of GM and player agency.</blockquote>

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