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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3404262" data-attributes="member: 4937">And what I'm saying is that allowing a player to script the rails that his train runs on is no more interesting than a DM scripting the rails that a train runs on.  In the later case, the players end up wondering why they are their since nothing that they do can change the predetermined outcome, and in the former case the DM (and maybe even the other players) wonder why they are there since some player no matter how he steers the wheel is allowed to get where he's going anyway.The default assumption of any D&D setting I'm aware of is if you work for it, a big thematic or dramatic payoff is available.  It's not like adding that as a possibility adds anything new.Likewise, its a pretty bizarre DM that needs to identify a players needs for a players to have villains and plots to foil.  I thought we all already did that.  It's not like I've ever once been in the middle of DMing and thought to myself, "You know, these players seem to have a need to face down villains and foil thier diabolical plots.  Perhaps I should add villains and diabolical plots to my game setting, since they didn't exist thier before."  I mean, seriously, do I need to be a "reactive game engine" in order to have a setting with villains and diabolical schemes?  And why the heck would I want to be a "reactive game engine" in the first place?  I'm not a computer.  I'm another person setting down to the table who wants to be entertained by the game, and as I've expressed before, I believe being the game master gives one a reasonable expectation of game ownership since of all the players playing the game, the game master by far invested the most time and effort in its preperation.As for motivating a character, I once started a campaign in which I'd allowed players to create characters.  Once I started playing I realized that all of them had created radical introverts that had no internal motivation to actually go out and have adventures, and whose personal preferences gave them no reason to actually associate with each other (and actually reasons to actively dislike each other).  Do not assume that if you give players the choice of what to do that they'll necessarily choose to do anything that is even interesting to the player himself, much less interesting to the DM.  I don't know how many times a player has created a character that requires me to bludgeon that character into doing anything at all.  Quite often, a player has no really good idea what he wants to happen, or else has a good idea only of an end goal but no idea whatsoever how to get there.  Not pulling players along with a hook has some serious drawbacks to it as well, and not pulling players along with a hook does not necessarily gaurantee that the players will have a good time.Most of all, no game does not have restrictions on player action.  It's the restrictions on player action that make a game interesting and meanful.  If players could actually do anything, then thier wouldn't be a game.  It's a game because the players have to make choices within the limited sphere of possible action that is permitted.  That means that players can't just walk through walls just because they want to (unless that ability gets explicitly added to thier list of permissable actions), or can't instantly arrive hundreds of miles away (unless that ability gets explicitly added to thier list of permissable actions), and so forth.  It also means that a character who has an end goal state in mind, "I want to be the most feared pirate lord in the nine seas!", must get thier one step at a time and if they take thier first step as, "I go down to the naval yards and steal the biggest man-o'-war in the port." they are likely to have very short careers if they insist on that course of action.There are additional restrictions that we must take into account in practice.  The story being told is by necessity an ensemble one.  The players don't have to be all on the screen at the same time all the time, but it helps if they are all on the screen at the same time a goodly portion of the time.  The game world cannot be painted at infinite speed by even the most creative and extemporaneously talented DM without something being sacrificed.  This 'game engine' you are talking about is a talented one, but its still only human.  Player choice has to be constrained by what the DM can manage to create.  About this time some player will pop in about how they had this one session that was completely unscipted and it was the best session that they ever had, but in 20+ years of gaming with multiple DM's I can tell you that sessions like that are the exception rather than the norm.  For every completely unscripted session or event that goes really well, 5 or 10 or 20 end up being various degrees of disaster that lead to player deaths, TPK's, or just plain boredom.  All the best times I've ever had as a player were in sessions where the DM had heavily invested in perparation because thier is a certain depth and interconnectivity and mystery and surprise that only comes with that, and if all of your sessions that you enjoyed were completely spontaneous I'm inclined to think that its because you've had alot of boring campaigns and something 'wierd' was needed to shake them up (I know I've been there, "My character goes over and pulls down the villages sacred statue...").What I find particularly interesting about this is that Will Wright games don't actually have big dramatic payoffs.  In fact, the average Will Wright game features artificial awards (say monuments in Sim City) just to demarcate that you've actually made some progress.  Otherwise they are just one small incremental change after the other which have no goals except for arbitrary ones that the player may (or may not) set for themselves.  But I've never once had dramatic payoffs from one the way I've had from games that had a better blend of scripting and player choice - like say Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Homeworld, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, etc.</blockquote>

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