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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2846388" data-attributes="member: 26473">Umbran, there is no recourse to authority here - your opinion and experience is your own, as is mine, so leave the "objective" pretense off the table.Recently I sat down with a buddy of mine to play an evening of Traveller - we had a subsector map and four characters (two each) that comprised the crew of a free trader, with a little starting capital and a lot of debt. That's it - no plot, no details other than those on the subsector map and our characters sheets, and no referee. We used the existing encounter, trade, reaction, and mishap tables to determine who and what our characters met, and we took turns roleplaying the non-player characters, using skill checks as needed per the rules.Again, no plot, and no dedicated referee - just two guys taking random results and roleplaying them to the best of our abilities.In the course of our travels, we battled pirates, smuggled jewels, dodged starport security, endured inspections, bribed officials, repaired broken drives, and travelled to a dozen star systems. The "story" was what came from those random encounters, told after the fact - I kept notes, and I plan on turning it into a story hour.It didn't take "logical consistency, interesting linkages, and high probability of complex interaction," and the sum total of the "setup" was the planetary profiles provided by a Judges Guild supplement. All we needed was some roleplay imagination and those random encounter generators.This was not an isolated occurance, by the way - our Advanced Dungeons and Dragons gaming group back in the day explored a dungeon made using the generator and encounter tables in the back of the DMG for months. Again, the story was what arose out of those encounters: defeating a fearsome foe, getting our codpieces handed to us by what should have been a "pushover" monster, getting lost, getting found, dodging a trap, negotiating with another party of adventurers, finding a magic item, losing a friend. The sum total of our experiences became our story of adventure, of derring-do, of shared hardship and sweet success, of friendships made and lost, of simmering conflicts and vengeance sought.So yes, Umbran, I do think you're full of hooey on this, as I do most "storyteller" game masters. Dress the scene, herd the extras, and get the hell out of the players' way - that's all the game master needs to do.</blockquote>

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