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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3405474" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you over state the importance of that.  I can have 'hero points' in D&D that grant rerolls or bonuses to dice rolls or fortunate item 'discoveries' and various other things, and while this gives the character's certain options and might increase thier survivability, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with player choice in anything but a tactical sense.Without knowing those systems or mechanics, I can't really comment.I think we may be talking about several different things.  If you approach your role as a DM sufficiently from a simulationist perspective, and you are a narrator only in the sense that stories will unfold in any sufficiently interesting setting and you've brainstormed ahead of time what some of those stories may be, then I feel you are 'pre-scripting'.  You've created a framework in which player choices can be made, and unless they players decide to completely leave the framework ("I don't want to be here, lets decide to go 50/500/5000 miles that a way.") none of thier choices in it will really thwart you nor will the fact that you've got a setting where you've thought about where things would go if the PC's don't do something to alter that thwart the PC's from acting.But you seem to be talking about scripting at a much more micro level, which I'll get back to in a second.There is no difference.  World-shaping choices are just localised choices within a pre-determined framework of options where the scale has been increased (and necessarily the world has lost some of its granularity).  A good example of this might be a typical Sci-Fi game in which you go hopping about saving the galaxy, but each planet is basically one city or even one location in a city like a spaceport or bar.  The network - removed of its fluff - still looks the same whether its 5 miles to a village or 5 ly to a planet, and the adventure flowcharts if you have them still look the same to, and the BBEG is still basically the same whether he threatens the universe or just the island kingdom.  It's all just fluff, and player choices still change thier game environment to the same degree.I'm not sure I understand how that follows.  Are you suggesting that thematically it doesn't really matter whether Luke blows up the Death Star or fights alongside his father to save it?  What I'm suggesting is that the story outcomes may be very different, and result in all sorts of different character conflict, but that the same general planning can't be used which ever side Luke chooses.Dragonlance is not the best of examples simply because it is written as a railroad and if you run it as written, it will be.  What I'm saying is that these flowchart style modules both are merely chapters in a larger story - and sometimes optional chapters at that - and that its not so hard to dynamically add a new branching path if the players insist on doing something really original.  In Dragonlance in particular, this is - once you have all the modules and are not waiting on them to be delivered - not as hard as you may think, since you have access to not merely a story but a detailed setting.I just don't see them as in any way mutually exclusive.  As a percentage of the words spent on a subject, most of the LotR focuses on interpersonal conflict, but there is still the war going on and an epic quest to bring a widget to a certain location.</blockquote>

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