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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pukunui" data-source="post: 5543570" data-attributes="member: 54629">You know, I would actually love to try that someday. I'm not sure I'm quite ready yet (as is no doubt evident in this thread), but it's sort of what I hold to be the "ideal". I would love to be better at improvising and just going with the flow.The thing is: the guys asked me to run Dawn of Defiance. We all knew going into it that it was going to be a fairly railroady plotted adventure. While I don't have a problem with railroading as a GMing technique in general, I prefer it to be subtle. That being said, I would love to try an open-ended sandboxy player-driven thing sometime. I think some of the players in my group are ready for that sort of thing, but others are not.One of the challenges I've faced with this group over the years (and changes of personnel) is getting many of the players to engage with their PC and see him/her as more than just a collection of numbers and words on a piece of paper. Some of them get into it, others don't. And that's fine. But it is kinda hard to roleplay when you haven't got much to go on in the first place.Anyway, I think things will work out well going forward because the two remaining players are both very story-oriented gamers. They don't really care about the rules or the mechanics of their character. Or at least they don't care as much about those things as they care about the story and about their characters and the interactions they have with NPCs and the like. One of them, the girl gamer, is very much a "What Would My Character Do?" type of player, which is fantastic. The last thing we did last summer was a sidequest that I came up with myself (well, it was loosely based on a short mini-adventure from one of the supplemental books) and which, incidentally, everyone loved - during the adventure her PC found and rescued her brother. The player has just suggested to me that I use her brother as a support character for the downsized party because she didn't feel the two siblings would want to be separated again, which is funny because I was thinking of using him myself.The other one, my "mentor", is a bit more interested in combat than the girl is (understandably) but he's just so jazzed to be playing Star Wars and he really gets into his character a lot too (a rebellious clone trooper who refused to carry out Order 66 and has now killed more than his fair share of his "brothers" who went on to become stormtroopers). I've had several good conversations with him about all this already. While he agrees that I am taking some of it too seriously, he also agrees that maybe it's just time for a change.Neither of these two players seem to be at all upset that we'll be downsizing to just the two of them. And frankly I am very much looking forward to it. It'll be more intimate, for one thing. For another, I think the game will go much more quickly while at the same time not feeling as rushed. With so many players at the table before, combats got pretty slow and there were a number of players who were always impatiently hurrying other people along, particularly the girl who has only ever played PbP games before and thus isn't used to the pressure to act quickly and decisively during initiative combat at the table.All right, so I'm starting to ramble again. Gotta go help put the kids to bed.</blockquote>

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