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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7085111" data-attributes="member: 42582">I am not talking about how the death of Luke's family makes him feel. I'm talking about the "dramatic needs" (to use a semi-technical term) of Luke as a character. His motivation.I've quoted your presentation of Star Wars as an episode of RPG play. Some key decisions taken by the GM include:(1) The Luke has to accompany his uncle to buy some droids; (2) That the first mech-droid purchased blows up; (3) That the two droids that ultimately are purchased are on the run from the Empire with secret rebel/Jedi-relevant information; (4) That the mech-droid runs away; (5) That Obi-Wan rescues Luke from the Sand People; (6) That the Storm Troopers track down the droids to the Jawas, and kill Luke's family.I've skipped some stuff (eg that the droids get picked up by the Jawas) but that might be a further item to go on the list, dependng on the details of how the imagined game unfolds.From the point of view of the OP, asking about judgement calls vs railroading, I am moved to ask: on what basis does the GM make decisions (1) to (6)?Here are some options:(a) Random rolls (eg Obi-Wan is a Hermit entry on a random encounter table); (b) Sheer fiat (eg the GM is running an "event-based" module a la Dead Gods and (1) through (6) is the prescribed sequence of events); (c) Taking cues from Luke's player (eg Luke's player has an entry on his PC sheet that says something like "I will oppose the Empire and aid the rebellion"; (d) Adjudicating action resolution (eg Obi-Wan turns up as the result of a successful Circles-type check; the family being killed is narrated as the consequence of a failed Navigation check; etc)Those options don't exhaust the field, and of course some of them can be mixed and matched (eg my normal practice is to use (c) and (d) in conjunction). My view is that different sorts of procedures used to establish in game events like (1) to (6) produce very different RPG experiences. The fact that the fiction itself might be identical doesn't change that.Some of these methods (eg (a) and (b)) can be used without having any knowledge of a PC's motivation. But others (eg (c) and (d), which happen to be quite important to me) cannot. Hence my comment, upthread, about "GMing blind".Absolutely. That's why I've been saying that, merely from a recount of the fiction, one can't tell anything about how the RPGing took place.This is why, whe I do session write-ups, I (as best I can) write up actual play reports, not "story hours". I don't want to talk about fiction - as [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] said, the fiction of my RPGs is nothing very special, especially for non-participants. I want to talk about RPGing!It's over 30 years since I've run a campaign where "kill monsters, get treasure, gain level" was the basic motivation. (Though I did recently run a AD&D session that went more-or-less like that.)When I use material from a module (eg Night's Dark Terror, as [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned upthread) one of the first things I do is identify a way of hooking the module elements I want to use onto established PC motivations. From my point of view, that's a basic part of GMing.My own view is that what I think you mean by "shared authoring" can often be overrated, or at least exaggerated, as an element of player-driven RPGing.In the OP there is "shared authoring" in one sense: the player declares a Perception check, and its success results in it being true, of the fiction, that it contains a vessel in the room. But the player didn't author that by any sort of fiat: it was a part of the process of action declaration and action resolution.4e has less of that sort of mechanic than BW; MHRP/Cortex has more of it. Rolemaster, which I GMed near-exclusively for nearly 20 years, has none of it.At least as I approach GMing, the key to a player-driven game is not that the players get to directly author the fiction in the moment of play. Rather, what is key is (i) that the GM frames scenes having regard to the evinced concerns/interests of the players, and the dramatic needs of their PCs (these might come out in part by the players' authoring of PC backstory, which is not the same as authoring fiction in the moment of play), and (ii) that the GM, in narrating consequences of action resolution, allows player success to stand, and connects failures back to those concerns/interests/dramatic needs.So the players are not driving in virtue of authorship (in any literal sense). Rather, they are the ones who establish the focus, the stakes, and - via their successes - at least some of the consequences.</blockquote>

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