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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6814463" data-attributes="member: 177">That's one established description of story, unfortunately, it is only one, and misses a great swath of storytelling out there, and I submit that APs actually fit a different model:Start with the Protagonist.  Each player is their own protagonist, and this is, as you said, a character who is going to take up the Dramatic Need.  However, at the start of the story, the Protagonist doesn't really have much of a Dramatic Need.  Their life is going on basically okay, until you...Add the Antagonist.  This is the character(s) that provide the Dramatic Need - something the Antagonist is doing changes the world in a way that creates a Dramatic Need the Protagonist takes up.I submit that this is actually how much heroic fiction is structured.  Heroes don't fix what isn't broken - that's actually the villain's role, seeking an end and being willing to tromp over anyone to get there.  Heroes are typically *reactive*.  The antagonist must first break things before there the heroic Protagonist needs to act.  Luke Skywalker's stated Dramatic Need was "get off this podunk backwater desert planet".  His need to "become a Jedi like my father" only came up *after* Vader and the Emperor created a crisis via building the Death Star, backing Luke (and many other moral people) into a corner such that they need to act.  In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain American warns us that, "Every time someone tries to end a war before it starts, innocent people die. Every time." The need is a result of action in such cases.   Now, we could of course use a meta-structure to manage this, using a level of abstraction - we state that Luke's *real* dramatic need is to become a Jedi, but stipulate that the character doesn't actually know that at the start of the story.  That works fine if you are a sole author, I suppose.  But for role playing, this seems an artificial construction, stuffing a square peg into a round hole - you can do it, but the player then has an internal conflict over having to deny his actual need for a significant period of time.  Things that set the player's actual agenda against the agenda stated in the narrative tend to be immersion-breaking constructions.With my construction, how pre-authoring and scenario design fit in becomes obvious - it is providing a series of large and small scale dramatic needs.Now, again, the GM needs to have pretty solid grasp of the characters to provide such a series, or conversely, the player needs to be not terribly picky about what will provide a satisfying need.  We do need to remember that not all players are even very good at creating their own Dramataic Needs out of whole cloth.  I know several who, when told they can do *anything they want*, suffer from option paralysis.So, take Ashen Stars (which is on my mind, as I'm running it) has a two-pronged approach that goes a long way in assuring the Dramatic Needs presented will be interesting to the players.  One is to ensure a common understanding of the genre - the players are informed that they are the crew of a ship, a group of "lasers", licensed contractors that get hired to solve crimes and problems.  Picking up a variety of unconnected cases to solve, rather than having a consistent and relentless pursuit of one's own agenda, is understood.  It is like saying, "You're the bridge crew of a Federation Starship" - This provides a host of implied, pre-defined Dramatic Needs, and the player is expected to be on-board with this.Moreover, the player is asked to submit specific encounters and events that are relevant to their character's personal desires - a "personal arc".   The *player* engages in some pre-authoring.  Consider that a moment, as we consider pre-authoring.  We have been speaking as if it is only a GM-thing, but that's an over-generalization, and we ought to consider the implications of player pre-authoring as well.  Are we going to contend that player pre-authoring will lead to not meeting player dramatic needs?</blockquote>

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