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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9615797" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, I know what you meant, but that doesn't mean there isn't a narrative or you aren't steering it.For example, rarely do the player characters appear on a blank slate.  There are specific opportunities for them to avail themselves of - challenges they can choose to undertake.  And in general, the player characters aren't the only actors in the setting.  Even if you choose to not have the PC's have any backstory, the NPCs have backstory.  Events occurred before the players entered the scene.  The NPCs have motives.  The NPCs have plans and desires.  So while yet it is true that the story is what the players do, this isn't actually stating anything particularly interesting or novel as you seem to think.But more to the point, it's not even a relevant comment in the situation, because even if you start a game as a GM with no plans for how it will unfold and are just responding to player input, you are still going to develop preferences and biases for what happens next - conscious or unconscious.  For example, you may not wish a TPK to happen as a conscious desire for the outcome of the current scene.  For whatever reason, you don't want "everyone dies" to be what the outcome of the player story to be.  So in that moment, how do you resolve what happens next?  If you are improvising content on the fly, how would you do it in such a way that it was not influenced by your bias to not have a TPK outcome and end the campaign on this note?  You can't metagame against yourself.  If you go, "Well, since I don't want a TPK outcome and I'm aware of that, then I'll improvise content that makes a TPK likely to thwart myself.", then you are still in the moment influenced by your biases and preferences for the story, just in a negative way.There is no perfectly realistic and naturalistic way to GM and if you think you are doing that, then you have deceived yourself.  One common aspect of DMing is that regardless of what the PCs do, something fun needs to happen.  Realistically, the fun doesn't happen where the PCs are at, and the opportunities don't fall into their lap.   Realistically, if you were Batman hanging out on roof tops over alley ways, you could hang out for years without being there to witness a mugging.  But in the game as in other fictional narratives, if Batman hangs out over an alley way he's guaranteed to witness a mugging or some other interesting event.And let's make this clear; that's not a bad thing.  In fact, if you don't do these things and steer the narrative through some sort of mechanism, then you create a Rowboat World, where the players can go anywhere but without purpose or plan it doesn't matter where they go.  Adrift in a vast ocean with no landmarks and little content, the players can flail around with perfect freedom of choice, it's just none of their choices have any agency, like a man in a rowboat lost on a vast ocean with no land in sight.  You row a lot and you get nowhere.  And that would be the players story, because that would be what they do.</blockquote>

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