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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 2457607" data-attributes="member: 9391">Interesting stuff. (And all "on topic" enough for me -- I figure as thread starter I'm just the guy who brought up something to have a conversation about, and anything sparked by that conversation is relevant.)Just for clarification, the stances I listed come from the book Sorcerer & Sword by Ron Edwards. He uses them mostly to discuss the character-player split in motivations and knowledge. They get used a lot to describe techniques as well, since (for instance) someone who likes Actor stance might like a lot of in-character dialog as well.I'm pretty "out there" when it comes to setting creation, preferring bottom-up with a ton of player input. For instance, our latest campaign is based on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels. The PCs are Princes and Princesses of Amber, which if you've read the books means that they can leave Amber, start walking, and end up in any world they can imagine. In that situation, the stances get kind of blurred -- the characters themselves have some Director-stance powers. If they want the figure up ahead on the road to be a long-lost friend, or a hated enemy, they can make it so.What I've been doing so far, since this means that I totally can't prep the majority of NPCs, is having a brief kibbitzing session before a scene gets rolling. The player whose "turn" it is starts describing the scene, the NPCs, etc., and as we get inspiration we all chime in with ideas. I'll play the NPCs in a third-person narration way for a while until I see where the player wants the conversation to go, then I add detail and start speaking more in IC dialog until we're in a full conversation. It's been interesting to mix styles like that, and I admit it's one of the things that was in my head when I posted the thread. Sometimes it's a little like a scene in a play where the actor's on the phone -- nobody's playing the part on the other end, so the actor lets the audience know what both sides of the conversation are like through their own dialog. You can "author" a bit while remaining in character. We've only had one session ilke this, so we'll see how it changes over time, but it's been an interesting experiment.It's been really interesting in terms of the question "How do players come to understand the nature of the world they're in?" because they're largely creating it. Some players have come up with all sorts of information about their home Shadow (the particular world they live in), and expect me as GM to flesh it out and present it to them. Others are so vague that we haven't seen more than a few rooms, but the little details they've presented in character give us a tantalizing hint. However they do it, if there's some thematic bit they want to be important, it's become clear right away. And what's really interesting is it's made me realize I do this kind of thing all the time, and others might as well. If Bob's dwarf acts a certain way, that doesn't tell us everything about what dwarves are like in this world, or what his clan is like, but darn if it doesn't imply a lot, just through his characterization. And in the past I've used those cues a lot to shape what, say, his dwarf clan is like when we finally meet them. You folks ever experienced something similar?</blockquote>

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