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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clark411" data-source="post: 1203618" data-attributes="member: 4768">I'm running an Exalted campaign, and am facing some of the same issues of Free Will vs. Scripting.I think the best advice that I heard was to write the campaign like a play, with the players having no parts written out.  They are relatively autonomous, and you have no things that they absolutely must do.  The reprocussions of what happens can and should effect them in a logical pattern, and if the effects are large enough, they'll be swept up in them.Say in Act 1 Scene 2 the duke is to be killed by his son... your players may discover this in Act 1 Scene 1 and either side with the duke or his heir... This will cause the act to turn out differently. That or, in Act 1 Scene 3, they find out the Duke is dead and they pursue that line, which shifts the emphasis of the play towards the son of the Duke and how they work with him.  If they don't, Act 2 is the entirety of a bitter war between the Duke's Son and the Duke's Regent, which will undoubtedly suck in the players if they're either in the court politics or if they're in the country as freelance adventurers.I find this ideal myself.  The world turns with or without the input of the players, and I try to introduce the elements of this turning before it happens, as it happens, and after it happens.  Recently, my players came across an assassination attempt as it was happening... I scripted the event to transpire and I gave them invitations to the party it would happen at.  It was up to them to notice it, and they did... and it was up to them to do anything about it.  They led an investigation that resulted in the death of the assassin.The best part was, they didn't have to go to the party at all, and the plot wouldn't have met a dead end as I struggled to find some plot hook for them to stop the assassination attempt.  If they instead opted to spend the night at home figuring out how to increase the profits of their trade, or decided to go patrol the night streets for criminals vigilante style, the assassin would have gotten away with it and they'd find out and could again, opt to intervene with the plot from a new direction after the big change was already made.  That or they could just nod at it go "Oh that's too bad." and continue their own plans as long as they could, avoiding what was going on in the world... which would eventually lead to the plans of their potential opponents and allies not going awry, and then they'd meet the challenge of dealing with that.When they did actually find and kill the assassin, I went through my roughly sketched "script" of the future and altered it, as the assassin's part was struck out, and things changed from that.  The players got to accomplish something, I didn't prod them in the least with an NPC shouting "HERE TAKE MY PLOT!! AIIIGH!!!" and they're causing logical changes, some that they don't even know about.  Later on, they'll see their changes and appreciate them when they actually matter I hope, and there will, with luck, be a sense of continuity for them.They have however, been told that this is how the game is played.  Right now they, as Exalted, are divinely empowered mortals... the movers and the shakers, but they aren't alone.  There are hundreds like them plotting and planning daily, manipulating entire nations for great plots and petty ones alike.  The entire onus of keeping up with, overcoming, or falling behind the others like themselves is in their hands.  They can do it however they want, politically, militarily, economically (and they are), and change the world how they see fit.All i have to do is figure out what happens when they do nothing or when they do something... that and have the stats handy for anything they opt to handle militarily or "personally."It works fine.  There's no illusion of free will, save the natural, realistic free will of say... me deciding to go to the market to buy groceries and the stock market jumping 32 points while I do so, also, some guy flips me off on the road and I honk and he honks too.  The DM (or ST in Exalted's case) is handling the macrocosm of the world, the world's microcosmic reactions to the PCs, who are in charge of what they do, and the impact the latter has on the former.  It is in no way, shape, or form, either a lofty and unrealistic goal, or is it necessarily a superior or inferior form of handling DMing.  But, it does work fine... at least in a Storyteller system.</blockquote>

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