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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9414217" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I think we define what the DM is doing radically differently.What I see Matt Mercer doing, and what I do myself, is preparing a setting, focusing on the areas in which the players are mostly likely to focus in the near future. Preparing a setting, for me, means understanding the history of the place and the principle actors within it, especially their motivations.An example: in my home campaign, the party decided to take a job dealing with some sort of mysterious creature allegedly harassing a nearby swamp village. They had other options, but for various reasons, that gig got their attention. Okay, so I know, but they don't, that the creature is a froghemoth working for a hag. And her beef is with the villagers, who in order to make money off the burgeoning appetite for frogs legs amongst wealthy toffs, are over-harvesting and hurting the ecosystem (I had recently watched The Muppet Movie and shamelessly stole the idea). Prior to this, the hag and villagers had a fairly copacetic relationship.And then the players show up, and try to figure out the situation and how to deal with it. They wound up tracking down the hag, and somewhat predictably fighting her, and killing the froghemoth. But then they figured out the whole story, so they wound up making a deal with the hag to basically make reparations, and a 5-6 game arc came out of that, part of which tied into one of the characters backstories, because the character was suffering under a curse and it made sense to the player that a hag would know about curses.Was that railroady? The original story hook was dangling out there for the players to seize, and I had already created the basic situation, and then added more as the relationship with the hag developed. To me, that is not "the GM planning out, in advance, what their own contribution to the conversation is going to be." I had no idea where things were going, nor that the swamp job was going to lead into a weeks-long arc that would ultimately resolve one key aspect of a character's backstory. I put the pieces in place, but the players decided what to do with them.What I see Mercer doing is similar: it's having all the pieces ready, and then reacting to what the characters do with them. He doesn't know what they are going to do and reacts to them in real time, but at the same time he understands that they want to participate in a shared story and are likely to go in particular directions. In fact, in the current campaign of Critical Role it remains an open question whether the party will ultimately ally with or fight against the entity that has been mostly in an antagonistic role to this point. It's been given a viable point of view, much like the hag above.This is different from, say, an adventure module where the story has to progress in a certain way. I am currently re-writing the new Vecna adventure to make it much less prescriptive, for exactly this reason.</blockquote>

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