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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3405105" data-attributes="member: 4937">You've not shown me anything that suggests that there is a qualitative difference between the two.  The DM is always going to be scripting out the challenges that occur.  Players will always make small localized choices within a framework.  Maybe its a failure of my imagination, but I can't imagine what the difference you are seeing actually is.And again, I don't see it.  Player actions might tell me which 'side' they wish to take in a conflict, what setting intrigues them, whether they are motivated primarily by personal gain or whether they are looking to serve some larger cause, and each of those choices can be met with big thematic payoffs in the context of any number of conflicts I could introduce to a setting.  But each of those thematic payoffs might involve at some point searching for a wonderous widget hidden in some 5' square, and in each case if that thematic payoff is to truly be a big time payoff it has to happen in ways that the players don't expect, that involve a good deal of planning, and some sort of creative twist that creates that all important moment in a story where the seemingly minor story points come together into something larger and more glorious than you thought they were.  The big thematic payoff has to be thier waiting to be discovered.  Else, it just won't be a really big payoff.In which case, you end up with a really light story.  I'm reminded of the scene in 'The Sixth Sense', where Bruce Willis's character tries to tell a story, and it is a story in the strict sense, but it has no plan to it, no rising action, no epiphany, and no satisfying conclusion.  Haley Joel Osmet's character replies (paraphrasing from memory), "You don't know how to tell a story do you?  A story has to have a twist."Oh good grief, so now the game needs a villain and a plot only if I think the player's 'need' one?Don't you even see where that goes?  A player tells you, "Heh, I need to play a 11HD aberration with disentigrate at will and the ability to generate an anti-magic field.", and I'm supposed to toss out my notes and say, "Ok Mike.  Hold on while I think out a Epic planescape/spelljammer campaign that involves Joe as a feared pirate lord.  Shouldn't take me more than 10 minutes.  Bob, could you please tear up your character sheet and create something more suitable in the 21st level character range, and Sue you can still play your Shaman, but I think you'll have to rewrite your character background as well or at least add some more pages to it.  Karen, it doesn't look like this is going to be very low magic afterall.  Sorry."Can you handle that?  Do you think you can keep all the players happy if you give any of them that much freedom of choice?  How do you think the other players are going to respond to one players declaration that he wants to play a PC beholder?I really hate it when people treat me as stupid.  I might not get something, and I'll freely admit I don't get it.  But I don't need basic lessons in how to DM.  Conscripted against thier will into a military unit to try to save the world from immenent alien invasion?  Does that sound like something that can throw people together?  It wasn't that I couldn't drag the story along, it was that without adequate PC involvement, it was boring for me to do so.  And it wasn't satisfying for them as it could have been, because they were being dragged along.  Unfortunately, dragging them along was the only option because otherwise the players wishes for the story pulled them in opposite directions along separate and mutually exclusive paths.Anyway, I'm tired of responding to you point by point.  We are talking past each other.  So I'll be brief.I continue to think that 'outside-gamer success' bolsters my points rather than detracts from them.  The Sims are to me a wonderful example of why this approach doesn't work for RPG's - no story, no challenges, no real failure, no real success, and no broad appeal within the actual gaming community.  And I've played RPG's long enough that I now expect my player's to entertain me by "projecting interpersonal drama and conflict onto babbling avatara.", and I tend to get a bit bored if they don't.  There is nothing worse than having to carry on conversations between two or NPC's while the PC's just look on like they are an audience instead of players.</blockquote>

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