Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2745821" data-attributes="member: 812">I have a lot of trouble understanding what you're saying. My PC isn't going to follow just any plot hook. If a mysterious wizard shows up and says, "Retrieve for me the Staff of Mighty Blooblah," my PC is going to say, "Um, go get it yourself, bucko. I got things to do."Your posts are very difficult to understand, Bastoche. I still don't know if you're arguing for or against open-style gaming, for example. I don't know whether the campaign you hated so much was open or railroady. Please try to communicate a bit more clearly if you want to have a useful conversation.No campaign is COMPLETELY open. The very idea is nonsense. If I start a campaign in Forgotten Realms, then certain possibilities are implicitly not available. You can't play a kzinti space pilot, for example. You can't decide to blow up the Empire State Building. Any campaign is closed to some degree.Of course, no campaign is completely closed, either. So let's please stop debating about one or the other. The question is, how much power over the story of the campaign do the players want to have, and how as a DM can you facilitate that (assuming you want to)? Statements like Bastoche's "a game is either open-ended or it's not" are false and silly.One of the key joys of gaming (as opposed to making up stories by yourself) is that you don't have control over how things will turn out. Part of this is because of the random factor of the dice, but part of it is also because the story involves the choices of OTHER people. The choices other people make will necessarily restrict the options available to you. This applies to players as well as DMs: if I as DM decide that today an earthquake will strike the city, toppling the castle and killing thousands, then that affects the choices of the players. It's not railroading them, but it DOES affect what they can do. They can't now decide to climb the highest tower of the castle to see if the Gem of Important Stuff is up there -- if that's where they think it was, they'll have to search the rubble to find it.Likewise, if the players decide that the Gem of Important Stuff isn't all that important after all and that they can achieve their objective without it, well then, they don't have it. They can't later suddenly decide "No, it's important, so we've had it all along."Open-ended doesn't mean "no consequences". Or at least it doesn't to me. If you decide to climb a tree and succeed, you're now at the top of the tree. If Joe the Wizard asks you to retrieve his unicorn and you don't, then Joe doesn't owe you a favour about the unicorn.Another example: One of my players in Barsoom decided that his character had a family torn apart by accusations of treason. His father was hanged and his mother disappeared. A year or so into the campaign I decided to do something with the disappeared mother. I decided she'd been kidnapped by a rival family and was being held at some location. I further decided that there was something supernatural about his mother's family -- a sort of werewolf curse.So our hero came across some information that his mother had turned up. The rival family was trying to lure him into a trap but he didn't take the bait. The party was engrossed in other stuff and he didn't pursue the hints. He came across an old friend who had seen his mother in (of all places) a brothel. He still did not pursue the information.Okay, after a year or so of this I got bored so I changed things up. The curse manifested, Mother turned into a slavering beast, slaughtered her guards and escaped. News of a disaster at a home of the rival family came out. News that the PC's mother was at large came out. Still no interest from the PC.Fair enough. Barsoom was always a pretty open-ended campaign, and the PCs had plenty to do, so it wasn't a problem.HOWEVER. There were consequences. A woman who had been a little soft on the PC tracked down his mother and tried to take care of her. She contacted the PC and said, "Hey, I've got your mother and she's not well. I think she's dying."STILL the PC didn't get interested. Fair enough. Nobody has to bite at any hook. But there are consequences. The woman taking care of his mother was surprised at the PC's apparent lack of concern for his own mother. She grew to despise the PC, even as she continued tending his mother's last days. The mother died. The woman, convinced that had the PC returned to the family home the mother might have recovered, became a bitter enemy of the PC. The family curse passed to the PC, as well, and he now had lost the most complete source of information on the curse.Meanwhile, the party has gone on all sorts of adventures, culminating in the destruction of an evil goddess and the restoration of an important global organization. None of this has hindered their efforts in any way. It's just been going on in the background while they've been adventuring -- along with a zillion other things.Had he gone to look after his mother, things would have been different. The woman might have admired him and become a friend or a lover. His mother might have recovered. He might have learned enough about the curse to control it. He might not.Long story. My point is, in any campaign, things are going on. Whether or not the PCs choose to get involved is ALWAYS up to them, but I have the most fun as a DM (and I believe that my players have the most fun as well) if I keep those things moving in their absence. If there are CONSEQUENCES to their choices.</blockquote>

Verification