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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6814913" data-attributes="member: 27160">I agree that there is sometimes an element of that. But there is also an element of "pre-authored campaigns are rich, many-layered worlds bursting with life whereas develop-in-play worlds are thin, cardboard cutouts". I don't think either of these characterisations is either true or helpful.Of course you can do all that - but the fact remains that the GM is putting forth a (limited) selection of Dramatic Needs for the players to select from. They might be ones that the GM has chosen to be of potential interest to the players - but they are still provided by the GM, not evolved through player actions as the game is actually played.NOTE: I'm not saying that either of these is better - I'm just saying they are different. This is what makes a nonsense of the statements arguing that one method or another is the "best way to do it". There is no "it" - there are at least two "its". It therefore follows that there may be more than one "best way", since all the "its" are not the same.Sure. But sometimes we have to take a break to recover from the hiccoughs, go to the "rest room" or think about what to get for dinner. Fiction is formed mainly while ignoring these things. It's not that stuff irrelevant to the story doesn't happen, it's just that time spent on it is time wasted (unless it has some particular purpose - red herring, contemplation break, chance to meet an interesting NPC or whatever).Yeah, I understand that, but it is instrumental in allowing the player free reign to define their own Dramatic Need. Without it the Dramatic Need will tend to be set by the world (and thus the GM), not the player. If you don't feel a need to freely define your own Dramatic Need, then this really isn't an issue.In a "traditional" adventure? The original Protagonist is the BBG, as I said. They have some ambition that they pursue that gets in the PCs grills - or at least, that's the idea. The players are expected to react.More or less, yes. I can't speak for others, but as I see it the players just have their characters set out to achieve their Dramatic Need in the simplest way available to them. The GM then creates consistent, plausible antagonists as required to stop (or at least challenge) them doing so. In this type of play the antagonists are shaped by their interaction with the protagonist's dramatic need, but in order to stay plausible and consistent they may need to gain more facets if they are "in contact" with the PCs for any length of time.The antagonist can also be created as a reaction to the dramatic need, but otherwise, yeah, this is pretty much what I meant when I spoke about the "villain being the initial protagonist". The GM, via the BBG, presents the players with a dramatic need (or several) by having villains act. The dramatic need becomes the essentially antagonistic business of stopping the BBG from achieving their dramatic need. I'm not sure if you are trying to reinforce my post, here, or you think I'm saying something contrary to this? Sure, many narratives work this way. Pre-authored "plot lines" can also work this way - as I specifically said. But it's different from players creating their own characters' dramatic needs. Not "worse" or "inferior", just different.Agreed; I touched on this, too. Some players are much happier picking from a selection presented to them than with complete invention - for a whole range of reasons. I wouldn't limit the explanation to option paralysis or lack of imagination or boredom or tiredness or anything else. There are plenty of reasons to want to be tempted by alternatives rather than have to "make your own fun".This is a good point, and I think it brings up the way in which this perhaps relates to the "DIP/DAS" dichotomy that was discussed at great length on the old RGFA boards."DIP" stands for "Develop In Play", and represents a style of play where players start out with charaters that are little or nothing more than a set of bare-bones stats and develop their characters and detailed histories and capabilities as play happens."DAS", on the other hand, stands for "Develop At Start" and represents a style wherin players think about and create a great deal about their character's history, desires and outlook before play begins. Players in this style of play might go so far as to author extensive character histories and describe networks of contacts in agreement with the GM.In the end it was agreed (pretty much) that neither of these approaches is "better" - they are just different.With "DAS" players I have no doubt that player-generated dramatic needs might be married with pre-designed setting and situation elements, if you are prepared to work at it and if the needs don't shift in play (as they can be prone to do). With DIP players, however, they will simply tend to get frustrated with pre-authored setting and situation if they wish to develop their own dramatic needs.I don't think there is anything essential or naturalistic about players freely creating their own dramatic needs. In our own lives, dramatic needs frequently seem to be presented to us as a set of limited choices or as inescapable necessities. But it does seem that a very attractive vein of escapism might be available through the pursuit of an imagined world in which we do have such freedom - even if it is only for one story out of the many that interweave to make up our lives. And the contention that free selection of a character's dramatic need somehow goes against the ethos that "a player should have no control over anything outside their own character" seems to me to be quite flawed - bizarre, even. I can think of vanishingly little more integral and internal to a character than the adoption of a dramatic need.</blockquote>

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