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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6197668" data-attributes="member: 42582">It may be that 3E is a GM-driven game. But 1st ed AD&D is not written as a DM-driven game. Have a look at Gygax's discussion, in the final pages of his PHB before the appendices, of what is involved in preparing for an adventure. That's not about DM-driven play.For instance, Gygax presupposes that players can equip their PCs out-of-session, presumably by dedcuting gp from their PC sheets and adding gear to their equipment lists: that is player authority to change the content of the fiction. He assumes that the players, not the GM, decide what the adventure will be - goals, targets, methods, etc. (The GM's role is simply to have prepared a location - a dungeon for the PCs to plunder.)Speaking purely for myself, I began to develop my current GMing style playing Oriental Adventures in 1986. This contains many of the key elements of player-driven gaming - a thematically-laden backstory (the classic Celestial Bureaucracy trope, familiar to Australian players at least through watching many episodes of the TV show Monkey, plus the classic samurai/obligation/loyalty/mysterious martial arts master tropes that are ubiquitous in samurai and kung fu fiction), together with PC generation that locates the PCs within that thematically-laden backstory, and that makes coming up with engaging scene very straightforward.It's true that the action resolution is a bit rudimentary - out of combat we're talking about CHA rolls on the old AD&D reaction charts, plus the OA non-proficiency system - but it's not utterly hopeless. (No game had anything fundamentally different until the mid-90s, I would say.)In other words, nothing in 1st ed AD&D points particularly towards GM-driven play, and key features of Oriental Adventures point strongly in the other direction.It is 2nd ed AD&D that marks a significant shift in the direction of D&D play towards being DM-driven. To the extent that 3E relies upon the same sort of approach to be playable, that's an interesting upshot of this thread which I have not appreciated before. 3E certainly doesn't present itself as 2nd ed AD&D redux, at least in my memory of its rulebooks.</blockquote>

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