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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7511472" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6881836]Josiah Stoll[/MENTION]I saw you've been looking at some other threads discussing GMing techniques. There's a range of approaches. The default on these boards emphasises GM-driven play (or APs where the GM channels the module author). What I'm going to talk about in this post/thread is a different approach. You might find it helpful, or not - all I can say is that it's been working for me for a long time now.RPGing is fun when the players are engaged. Combat is often engaging by default, because PC death is at stake. To make non-combat engaging, the players have to be able to see that something is at stake that they care about. This is what will get them wanting to engage. And they have to be confident that engaging the situation won't leave them hosed. The fear of being hosed leads to turtling, tedious tactically-focused play, a game that moves at the pace of treacle, etc. And also easily drifts back to GM-driven as the players look for the "correct" way to win (ie the one the GM has in mind) so that they can avoid being hosed.Where do ge the engaging stakes from? Your players. This can be overt - some systems build this into PC gen (eg Fate aspects; Burning Wheel beliefs), but it can be done in other systems too (when I started a 4e campaign I required each player to establish a loyalty for his/her PC, and also a reason to be ready to fight goblins). Or it can be implicit - in 5e, background in particular might be an implicit signal of how a player sees his/her PC and what s/he might be ready to care about in play.Here are <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?490456-Repost-first-session-of-Dark-Sun-campaign" target="_blank">four</a> <a href="https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?736425-Burning-Wheel-First-Burning-Wheel-session" target="_blank">actual</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?530990-Into-the-North-Cortex-Plus-Heroic-Fantasy-actual-play" target="_blank">first</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?586642-Classic-Traveller-session-report-with-reflections-on-the-system-long" target="_blank">sessions</a>. None is 5e (one 4e, one Burning Wheel, one Cortex+ Heroic, one Classic Traveller). But they show various things I've done as GM, working with my players, to create situations with combat and non-combat elements to them that the players will engage with in play.The other aspect I mentioned - avoiding a fear of hosing. "Fail forward" adjudication is designed to help with this. The key idea is that failure doesn't mean "You suck, it didn't work!" It means "Things didn't turn out how you wanted!" That could be because the PC sucks. Or because some external factor intervened that the PC didn't know about. Or maybe the GM narrates the failure by "revealing" (I use inverted commas because, at the table, the GM is making it up as part of narrating the failure result) some hidden aspect.The BW session report I linked to gives one example: the PC tries to meet with a senior member of his cabal to get work; the check fails (in BW its a Circles check; in 5e it might be a CHA check to reach out to connections), so instead of an offer of work or a hot tip from the senior sorcerer, the sorcerer sends a thug to tell the PCs to leave town. See how, even though the player didn't get what he wanted, the stuff he cares about is still a focus of play. The sorcerous cabal is still important to the game, and the PC hasn't been shown to be a failure; but now he has to somehow win back the trust of his cabal's leader (or whatever else he wants to do in response to the situation).Especially when it comes to getting a mediocre-skill fighter involved, these two things can work well together: if the non-combat situation invovles something the fighter PC (and the player of that PC) cares about then the player will declare actions; and even if they fail, "fail forward" adjudication means that the player didn't just get hosed or make a fool of him/herself or his/her PC - the thing s/he cares about is still there, still in play, but the situation around it has changed. So the player (and hopefully the other players too) get drawn further into the game, fiction keeps developing, instead of following the GM's trail of bread crumbs you're creating some story together.</blockquote>

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