Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6816939" data-attributes="member: 42582">And has a player stated a Belief for his/her PC that s/he travel to the Misty Lake? Or has a player given any sort of informal or implicit signal that s/he is interested in the Misty Lake? Where is the Misty Lake coming from, in this imagined scenario?Let's focus on character-driven goals.In this hypothetical sandbox, the GM has not authored in a Misty Lake (let's suppose); but one of the players authors for his/her PC the goal of travelling to the Misty Lake to speak with the spirit of said Lake, so as to learn such-and-such piece of backstory information - maybe to learn where the ancient vorpal sword Excelsior can now be found.What does the GM do?If the answer is that the GM introduces a Misty Lake into the sandbox - then how are you talking about some approach which is different from my preferred approach?If the answer is that the GM does not introduce a Misty Lake into the sandbox - then the campaign is exhibiting the very feature that I, personally, dislike, namely, the use of GM's pre-authored secret backstory (the secret, in this case, being the absence of a Misty Like), to determine in advance that a certain player (and PC) goal must fail.There is a third possibility, I guess, namely that the players will never come up with goals or orientations for their PCs that can't be satisfied within the pre-authored sandbox. One reason for this might be because, like [MENTION=27570]sheadunne[/MENTION], the players are simply "pinballing". Another might be that the GM, knowing the players so well, has already answered all the character-driven goals that they might come up with in the initial design of the sandbox. This second reason seems improbable to me, based on my own practical experience both of campaign setting design and of the way that actual play drives player imagination and character development. What's your experience in these respects?</blockquote>

Verification