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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7054880" data-attributes="member: 42582">Memento has a linear plot. It unfolds in temporal order. The gimmick of the film is that the plot is presented with the sequence of events reversed.I didn't say that.The example of a GM judgement call that I gave in the OP, and expressly denied to be railroading, was of setting a DC.In subsequent posts I've talked about approaches to framing, and to narrating consequences of failure. At some length.Sure. But that doesn't respond to my incredulity - which is why, in a thread where I have talked about the role of GM judgement calls in my RPGing, and specified in some detail the role of the GM as I understand and apply it, you would suggest that a GM is not needed.I literally do not understand what basis this statement could rest on.First, if read literally, an event that has neither unforeseen nor expected consequences has no consequences. Which is to say it's an event that is entirely causally contained within itself. I haven't talked about any such events, and there very existence must be highly controversial. I assume that by "expected" you meant "unexpected"?But that still leaves me utterly puzzled. For instance, finding a Ring of Protection in a Basic D&D dungeon has no unforeseen or unexpected consequences. It gives you a +1 to AC and to saves, full stop. But it's hardly just flavour!Furthermore, who said that events have no unforeseen or unexpected consequences? I have posted an example of an unforeseen consequence in this very thread - as a result of trying to carry bodies and blood across town, two PCs have been apprehended by the night watch and taken back to the watch house. That was not foreseen or expected by anyone at the table!How do you know this? Have you tried to run an indie-style RPG in which the players negate their own consequences of failure? And did it work?I personally think that it raises multiple issues, all of which would tend to conduce towards a less good game. The main one is the so-called <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">"Czege Principle</a>", which is Paul Czege's conjecture, based on experience, that "it’s not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict."If the players are going to play their PCs hard, doing their best to eke out success, it undercuts that to also have them adopting a "birds eye view" approach of trying to adjudicate failures that will pose challenges to the very characters for whom they are advocating in play. Hence the role of the GM.The consequences of success are set by the player, not the GM: the player declares an action for his/her PC, a check is framed, and if the check succeeds then the PC gets what s/he hoped for. (Eg a vessel to catch blood in.)The consequences of failure are narrated by the GM in relation to the action declared by the player, the broader stakes and theme of the game as established by the players, etc. The GM has to make a judgement call, and exercise creativity, but the parameters within which this takes place are not set by the GM. (Eg in the account described upthread, of the PC looking for the mace but instead finding cursed black arrows made by his brother, the parameters for that failure - the existence of cursed arrows, the brother as a mage who got possessed by a balrog, the towers as a place in whose ruins enchanted items might be found - all that was established by the player. Which is why the revelation of the arrows was such a punch in the gut.)Sure. The question is when and how are these established?The PCs in my main 4e game killed Torog. What consequences did this have? Some of these were established by way of framing - eg the emergence of the tarrasque into the world, now that Torog is not there to constrain the imprisoned primordials and other elemental beings. Others are candidates to be narrated as consequences for failure, although - to date - that hasn't come up.There is no need for me as GM to work out a whole lot of secret stuff in my notebook that records all the consequences of Torog's downfall that I then use to (eg) make secret adjustments to the consequences of player action declarations. And there is certainly no need for me to write down that stuff so I can have the satisfaction of admiring this gameworld that exists only in my head and my notebook and is not part of the actual play of the game at the table!The key question as far as my approach is concerned is whether you are planning matters of framing; or establishing secret backstory that will be used as a "filter" for resolution of player action declarations that is unknown to them.I don't know what you mean by "the same campaign".I've run OA campaigns (two of them, quite different - one was worldly, the other cosmological); GH campaigns (again, two of them; again, quite different); have a current Dark Sun campaign; have a current MHRP campaign; plus other dribs and drabs. I've run systems including Rolemaster, Runequest, AD&D, 3E, 4e, Burning Wheel, MHRP, maybe a couple of others I'm forgetting at the moment.But for the past 30 years I have used more-or-less the same GMing technique, of using the players expressed or implicit concerns/goals/aspirations for their PCs to inform my framing of scenes and narration of consequences. My campaigns also have a recurrent tendency to use a lot of history and/or cosmology as framing devices to generate motivations for antagonists, to inform the meaning of the actions of the protagonists, and to give "depth" to the gameworld and support immersion into it. (I would add: for backstory to serve this purpose it has to be known to the players as part of their experience of playing the game. Hence it has to figure in some fashion in both the framing of ingame situations and action resolution. And it has to be available to the players for them to buy into in the play of their PCs.)In that time I've never run a module strictly as written, as a story to be played through: the closest I've come was running Castle Amber in 3E, but (i) that was not "as written" because I had to convert to 3E on the fly, and (ii) it's a classic D&D module and so doesn't really have a story - it's an exploration crawl. (The Averoigne section gets the closest to having a story, but really it's just a looser setting for a MacGuffin quest.)When I use modules, I use them as sources of backstory elements, maps, creatures, ideas for situations to run. Modules I have used in this way and would recommend include Bastion of Broken Souls (but ignore the dungeon crawl at the end, and ignore the repeated advice that the interesting NPCs can't be bargained with and must be fought); Night's Dark Terror; <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?282788-Demonomicon-ToH-Orcs-of-Stonefang-Pass-and-Vor-Rukoth-in-hand&p=5259918&viewfull=1#post5259918" target="_blank">H2</a> and <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?335974-I-ran-my-first-Epic-session-last-Sunday" target="_blank">P2</a> of the 4e modules; Wonders out of Time (a d20 module); <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?366933-Grugnur-died-prone-in-a-pile-of-his-own-swordthanes!" target="_blank">G2</a>; <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?350416-Mayhem-in-the-Shrine-of-the-Kuo-Toa" target="_blank">D2</a>; <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473620-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-shenanigans" target="_blank">B2</a>; and again there are probably others that I'm forgetting.What's the point of the planning? Why plan in the way you describe? What's it for?</blockquote>

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