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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8226840" data-attributes="member: 42582">My reply just upthread to [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and [USER=1282]@darkbard[/USER] sketches one way of distributing player and GM roles in establishing opposition/conflict.I thought in this post I would sketch a different one, which I've been using a lot in my Classic Traveller game: random rolls on system-prescribed tables, and then integrating those into the emerging and established fiction of the campaign.When my group started our Classic Traveller game first the players rolled up their PCs - everything from stats to skills to starting money and gear is all rolled - which helped establish some PC backstory; and then I rolled up a starting world, and we worked out more backstory and PC interconnections that would make sense of that. Because one PC had Medic-1, and another PC had been mustered out injured and hence (it was decided) was just finishing up a stint in hospital, we determined that those two PCs knew one another (the first a carer for the second as a patient). The world I'd rolled was very high tech-level, so we all agreed that the medical equipment would reflect this.I then rolled a random patron. Because she was a Marine Officer I decided she would be a former comrade of the Medic-1 PC, who was ex-Imperial Navy. And because the main thing we had determined about the world was that it had this hi-tech medical facility, I decided that her "mission" for the PCs would involve medical gear.In addition, the hospitalised PC had Gambling-1 and started with a space-faring "yacht". The player decided he'd won it in a bet, and that the reason he was in hospital was because he'd subsequently taken a beating from the thugs who worked for the yacht's previous owner. So I decided that what the patron needed from the PCs was their ship - the previous owner had been her previous operative, and now she needed to recruit the PCs as her new operatives.From there, details emerged via play in a fashion a little closer to the PbtA style Manbearcat has described.In the fourth (or so) session, in the closing moments I rolled a random encounter with a Patrol Cruiser being used by pirates and decided that this was an Imperial vessel but connected to the Marine Officer's unlawful/irregular scheme (and hence "piratical" in that sense). In the between-session period I rolled up a crew for the vessel and established some backstory for them that fitted them into the established situation of the campaign. In the next session the players had some interaction with the vessel, and also intercepted some of its communications to the starport of the planet where this encounter occurred, and so some of the backstory I'd written came out - which led to the players choosing to ignore the vessel rather than interact with it, as they learned it was from the Marine Officer's "secret" base and they wanted to assault her base while he Patrol Cruiser was away from it.Over the course of play in the campaign the random rolling has reduced somewhat as there are more established elements which make sense for framing and consequences. In our last session I reintroduced that Patrol Vessel at the new world the PCs were on, and they interacted a bit more. It is likely to figure as a prominent antagonist in our next session too.Comparing this approach to the approach [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] described and that is familiar to me via Burning Wheel, I would say there is one key similarity and one key difference:* In both approaches, colourful PCs with relatively rich backstories find themselves immersed in a world that cares about and responds to them in ways that reflect connections to rather than alienation from the setting. (A really obvious contrast here: the PCs in X2 Castle Amber, both the chateau and Averoigne.)* In the Classic Traveller approach I've described, the action of the game is less thematically laden/character driven than in the PbtA/BW style. The action is driven more by external dynamics (a bit like a Mission Impossible film) and less by the deep dramatic/thematic needs of the characters (there is a contrast here even between the genre-similar MI films and Bourne films). I think this is a product of a few system features: what it is that the random rolls tell us; the lack of emphasis on "asking questions and building on the answers" which puts more responsibility on the GM to integrate the outputs of random rolls (we asked questions and built on answers in setting up the campaign, but it doesn't figure so much as a method once we pressed "play" and got going); where the system itself places emphasis in its resolution machinery; probably other stuff too.</blockquote>

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