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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6208067" data-attributes="member: 42582">In fairly standard AD&D play, the PCs arrive at town and go to the nearest tavern. How do we know who/what they see in there? Rolling on a random table is a fairly well-established technique. Which is to say, once you get out of a certain style of dungeon play in which everything has already been written up, determination of backstory in play has a pretty long history.Here is a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?299440-Exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-Sunday" target="_blank">link</a> to a session I ran focused on exploration/discovery. It was not totally no myth, but had a fair bit of generation of backstory on the fly, generally triggered in response to PC actions (eg the paladin examines the scroll; it has invisible ink on it). It shows how it can be done.It also shows that there is quite a difference between spontaneous creation of backstory by the GM in response to player cues, and player creation of backstory. I do a lot of the former in my game, but (as I've already mentioned upthread) only modest amounts of the latter, in part for reasons give in <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">Eero Tuovinen's blog</a> that [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] lnked to upthread (and that I also linked to earlier upthread).I uploaded my campaign notses upthread, with a bit of explanation, but got no comments or queries.This is just theorycraft. Is there any actual evidence that players in "indie" games are doing less thinking outside the box? From this thread I can't really tell, because the non-indie players aren't posting much actual play. I linked to several actual play posts upthread - why don't you have a read of them, and then tell me what you see that does or doesn't satisfy your expectations for a "thinking outside of the box" quotient.My own experience - though I haven't got any cofirmation for it beyond my own recollection of my onw play - is that one way to discourage players from "thinking outside the box" and engaging the situation is to routinely frame scenes in which, whatever they have their PCs do, they can't change anything. I don't know if you're still running a 13th Age game, but if you are - have you found that its Background mechanic, which allows players to narrate themselves into mechanical capabilities by fleshing out their backstories, has discouaged the players from engaging the fiction?I think the players would have excellent cause for complaint in the situation that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] described: namely, that multiple sessions of play result in an utter anti-climax.As a GM, there are so many ways to impliment such results - eg the unwanted attention starts hassling the PC in question, or the PC sees signs of the impending move prior to being ready for the heist and so has to go off half-cocked - that the off-screen fizzle is bascially inexcusable.In "indie"-style play, the Caradhras events would be the result of failure during resolution of the "Cross the Misty Mountains" scene.What are these implications? I haven't noticed them yet in my game.</blockquote>

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