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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6813753" data-attributes="member: 177">Sorry, I was away on vacation for a week, so I am far behind. There's one point I'd like to follow up on.I am not convinced this is true.  At least, it is no more or less true of pre-authoring than improvisational authoring.  To remind folks, I was using "character-driven" in the literary sense - being about the internal and emotional conflicts of the character (this contrasted wit plot-driven - being focused on the physical actions, or player-driven, in which it is mostly about what the player wants to do.  Fail-forward, however, is primarily about pacing of game actions, not about setting the themes of play for a session.  It seems to me that if you are using fail forward to *change* the emotional themes under consideration, you're stepping rather beyond what the technique was really intended to do.  I am not sure why you aren't at least pushing this to the scene-framing level.But, let's say you attempt to do so.  You need to have a pretty solid understanding of the character's buttons to press and chains to pull to make this work.  But, of course, the fact that you *need* to change themes means you hadn't correctly picked the right buttons to press or chains to pull earlier (whether pre-authored or improvised).  So, I'm not so sure this is the greatest idea.  Of course, pre-authoring also requires this same understanding of the characters.  One *always* needs to have this understanding to do character-driven stories. Once you have that understanding, I think the implementation is six-of-one, half a dozen of the other, to be honest.The issue however, is that this risks the game devolving into, "everything is about them".  As if every element of the Universe revolves around them and what makes the PCs tick.  It is healthy, I think, to be presented with material that isn't chosen entirely based upon the PC's or player's desires.  And, on top of this - not every GM is good at improvisation!I think, however, that not all pre-authoring is created equal.  Some of it is a helpful too, some is benign, and some is harmful to player engagement.  I find your presentation here a bit dogmatic on the point, to be honest.</blockquote>

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