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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9276593" data-attributes="member: 4937">That would be a first.&nbsp;&nbsp; I must have communicated my thoughts poorly.Yeah, that is definitely not what I said.&nbsp; There is a whole raft of ideology behind that statement that I don't espouse one of which is that the PC is signaling by their character choices what they want and it's your job as GM to test and challenge that.&nbsp; Coached in the idea that your job is to force story arcs on the player where the player's character changes and evolved and to test that player's/player character's conventions.&nbsp; This frequently leads to dysfunctional &quot;The GM is Satan&quot; play where you feel your adversarial play is validated by the system.&nbsp; The problem with seeing your job as putting stumbling blocks in the way of the player's priorities or seeing the goal of play is use mechanics to force narrative change is that you are really not incentivizing what you think you are incentivizing.&nbsp; What you are really doing is encouraging players to alter their character in order to survive or succeed.&nbsp; Of course, that can happen organically but if you are really setting out to do that as the primary focus of play: &quot;Oh so you say you love your family then, well let's kidnap them!&quot; or &quot;So you say you are an honorable Paladin, well how do you get out of this contrived moral dilemma?&quot; then you're just doing adversarial DMing hidden behind a barrage of jargon.And there are definitely prominent theorists in the RPG community that IMO are doing that; the sort of guy that admits a game is ruined for him when the players character get to the point that they succeed in the majority of their fortune tests and are thus harder to narratively bully.But please don't draw me into an argument indirectly with Pem.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9276593, member: 4937"] That would be a first. I must have communicated my thoughts poorly. Yeah, that is definitely not what I said. There is a whole raft of ideology behind that statement that I don't espouse one of which is that the PC is signaling by their character choices what they want and it's your job as GM to test and challenge that. Coached in the idea that your job is to force story arcs on the player where the player's character changes and evolved and to test that player's/player character's conventions. This frequently leads to dysfunctional "The GM is Satan" play where you feel your adversarial play is validated by the system. The problem with seeing your job as putting stumbling blocks in the way of the player's priorities or seeing the goal of play is use mechanics to force narrative change is that you are really not incentivizing what you think you are incentivizing. What you are really doing is encouraging players to alter their character in order to survive or succeed. Of course, that can happen organically but if you are really setting out to do that as the primary focus of play: "Oh so you say you love your family then, well let's kidnap them!" or "So you say you are an honorable Paladin, well how do you get out of this contrived moral dilemma?" then you're just doing adversarial DMing hidden behind a barrage of jargon. And there are definitely prominent theorists in the RPG community that IMO are doing that; the sort of guy that admits a game is ruined for him when the players character get to the point that they succeed in the majority of their fortune tests and are thus harder to narratively bully. But please don't draw me into an argument indirectly with Pem. [/QUOTE]

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