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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2852918" data-attributes="member: 2067">With respect, if there is one beginning and one end and just 30 different ways to get to the end, that's still constraining the action. And if it's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, that still limits choice to a few points along the way. And if you can react to individual events and shape the future of the plotline, if you allow for more randomness, the story almost always suffers for it. Defining those objectives still limits player choice to "you have to want these objectives." It's minor, yes, and it's definately something a lot of people can live with and have a lot of fun with, but it's definately antithetical to the style Gygax mentioned above, where you play the game and then tell a story about what happened in the game. It's more concerned about the story (ever so slightly, but slightly nonetheless) than about the game, so much so that it will waive a few options about the game to satisfy the needs of the story. I mean, I'm not knocking it. I've played and really enjoyed some heavily story-based games. But I fully admit that they did put some constraints on the players, too. Constraints they could live with, and enough randomness to create events that surprised me, but they were there. Certain characters might have been too important at certain moments to die, certain villains had to be introduced, certain NPC allies had to come about, there was a definate "end" and "beginning," etc. It's a chicken and egg scenario, really. Any D&D game contains at least a minor element of story (you go into dungeons because you want to get rich), and at least a minor element of gameplay (roll to hit). Many contain more elements of story (you're all destined to be great heroes, we're trying for a horror game so no gnome bards named Gaylord, we're fighting giants invading the town in this campaign, etc.), but all those ponits of story start to tread on the toes of the game (no evil characters, no gnome bards named Gaylord, better play a Dwarf if you want to be a good fighter, etc.). It's not an absolute destruction of free will (because no one would say that that's any fun). It's a more subtle, more like creating a channel for the water to run down, to direct the flow of the game. In my experience running story-laden games, if a PC were to Sense Motive on the secret villain, there's three choices. (1) Build up his Bluff to bizzarrely high levels (absolutely possible), (2) Hand-wave the check so that no matter what he rolled it wasn't good enough, or (3) Allow it to succeed, but then build another layer to it so that that one success doesn't dissolve the mystery entirely. Of these, 2 is the most story-heavy (because it's impossible to ruin the secret), 1 is fairly story heavy (it's effectively impossible, but justified in the rules), and 3 is the least (it still makes the SM check irrelevant in the grand plot, but allows some flexibility and reward for a skill check still). Either way, the flow cannot cross my dam and figure out who my "main villain" is because that would suck for storytelling and no one at the table would have fun. Versus my more game-like games, where a PC uses Sense Motive and I tell them exactly what they can sense if they beat the villain's Bluff check, and if they do, then they can slay the villain early and get the reward and then move onto the dragon in the hills or the kobolds in the sewer and such.It is a basic principle of game design even videogames have embraced. The story-heavy style is similar to a Final Fantasy or Zelda game or even one of your older Mario games where the next action is basically either laid out before you or within a narrow band of choices (you could take the warp zone, or you could barrel through in a striaght line). The game-heavy style is more similar to the "hub" system of an MMORPG, where there's a main meeting palce and stuff going on all around it that you just need to tease out of the surrounding NPC's (you never need to take the Fetch Water quest, and you can instead just gather orc ears all day long if that's where you have fun). In Final Fantasy, you never have a choice to abandon the world because that's not why you're playing the game. In an MMO, if you want to just grind without worrying about the missions, you're free to do so because you could be playing the game for many reasons.You seem a bit too defensive, so step off the flurry of blows for a moment. All I'm saying is that the more flexible the "story" the less "story-like" and more "game-like" it becomes. Are choose-your-own-adventure books a story or a game? They blur the line as much as a story-heavy session of D&D does.Every campaign has story and rules. That's kind of the enjoyment of a roleplaying game, after all. And they do come into conflict ("main character" dies, "main villain" doesn't save, "important clue" gets overlooked, "inappropriate character" gets unwittingly introduced), and where they come into conflict is where the game says one thing ("he failed the save, he died") and the story says another ("that's anticlimactic! He shouldn't die!"). If you fall on one side, the other does suffer, and balancing both so that it's at a fun level for the group is one of the key responsibilities of a DM. Every good DM balances it at a level that's fun for their group, but not every group has fun with the same amount or type of constraints. When I played a story-heavy game, they absolutely wanted to see what happens next to their narrowly imagined characters that I put wierd limits on ("you're all gnomes," "you start as normal people with NPC classes," "keep the same characters from the last campaign, this will be the sequel," "You begin in Carceri as prisoners, tell me how you got there. This campaign will be about escape," etc.). When I play my current game-heavy games, it's more about the challenge of monsters and missions, and about the world they're in ("we don't want to die, so what party roles do we need?", "should we go on that quest about the Athar and the dead god, or are we more concerned with the money we can get as couriers?", "I want to play a Cha3 Thri-Kreen")."All characters must be Good" is a constraint born of story, and while not every group would care about such a constraint (and some would prefer it, even), it is still a constraint, born out of reasons of plot and story. If it was more game-based, alginment wouldn't matter -- the story would arise out of the rules the PC's choose to use, rather than the rules shaping themselves around the story to be told.</blockquote>

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