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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9358200" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As usual, your severe bias is showing here Bloodtide. I don't run a neotrad game, I run a &quot;story game,&quot; because it's Dungeon World. But my players are perfectly happy with, for example, being caught by surprise when the Raven-Shadow assassin cult kills someone important while they were out and about. Yes, in theory, they could have stopped the killing if they'd been there, but they weren't there.What is key is you have to do this reasonably. That means, you can't just be constantly inserting such intrusions all the time, because then it feels like the players are being punished solely because their characters can't be in seven places at once. You can't do it egregiously, because that feels like being punished for not being omniscient enough to know which threat was the &quot;real&quot; threat and which was the &quot;not really all that bad&quot; threat. You have to consider what makes an interesting event, not just a shocking or frustrating one.In other words...you have to not just do things SOLELY because you feel like it. You have to think about what the impact of your choices as DM will be. The events that occur are not simply for your enjoyment. They're for everyone's enjoyment. For the good times to be especially sweet, sometimes there need to be bad times--but too many bad times will sour the good ones far worse than not having enough would.Yes, that's the stereotypical (and frustratingly sexist) origin of the &quot;Mary Sue.&quot; Just keep in mind that this problem is just as easy for men to fall into as it is for women. Young, inexperienced authors project themselves into wish-fulfillment fantasies that are only interesting to people who personally identify with the projected character. But wish-fulfillment fantasy is not an unusual genre; the entire &quot;isekai&quot; genre of anime, for example, is pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, where someone gets neatly and conveniently removed from our world (often by being run over by a truck, hence the memes about that) and then deposited into a much more interesting fantasy world with special powers.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9358200, member: 6790260"] As usual, your severe bias is showing here Bloodtide. I don't run a neotrad game, I run a "story game," because it's Dungeon World. But my players are [I]perfectly happy[/I] with, for example, being caught by surprise when the Raven-Shadow assassin cult kills someone important while they were out and about. Yes, in theory, they could have stopped the killing if they'd been there, but they weren't there. What is key is you have to do this [I]reasonably[/I]. That means, you can't just be constantly inserting such intrusions all the time, because then it feels like the players are being punished solely because their characters can't be in seven places at once. You can't do it egregiously, because that feels like being punished for not being omniscient enough to know which threat was the "real" threat and which was the "not really all that bad" threat. You have to consider what makes an [I]interesting[/I] event, not just a shocking or frustrating one. In other words...you have to not just do things SOLELY because [I]you[/I] feel like it. You have to think about what the impact of your choices as DM will be. The events that occur are not simply for your enjoyment. They're for everyone's enjoyment. For the good times to be especially sweet, sometimes there need to be bad times--but too many bad times will sour the good ones far worse than not having enough would. Yes, that's the stereotypical (and frustratingly sexist) origin of the "Mary Sue." Just keep in mind that this problem is just as easy for men to fall into as it is for women. Young, inexperienced authors project themselves into wish-fulfillment fantasies that are only interesting to people who personally identify with the projected character. But wish-fulfillment fantasy is not an unusual genre; the entire "isekai" genre of anime, for example, is pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, where someone gets neatly and conveniently removed from our world (often by being run over by a truck, hence the memes about that) and then deposited into a much more interesting fantasy world with special powers. [/QUOTE]

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