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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7088091" data-attributes="member: 16814"> I think, upon reflection, that what happens here is survivor bias.  You present the method as if it always produces relevant and useful backstory because you end up with a story at the end that can clearly trace it's way through all of these bits of story created using your method, so it appears that the method itself always produces the correct outcomes:  a good, well integrated story.  But this is ignoring all of the chaff that's created and discarded or forgotten or ignored.  As you yourself said, you don't have to look up what happened in game 4 years ago because it's always been relevant and at the forefront because it's become part of the ongoing story.  But, dollars to donuts, things were authored into the fiction 4 years ago that haven't made it and you don't remember until you look at it.  The difference there is that you don't care about those tidbits -- they can be overwritten because no one recalls them as important anyway (I believe something exactly like this was presented earlier in the thread).  But, again, this leads to a false positive for your style because you aren't actually honoring ALL of the fiction created, just the bits that end up mattering because the players and/or GM latch onto them.  Therefore, those are the only tidbits that 'survive' the gameplay, and you then base your final determination only on those survivors.  In reality, lots gets thrown at the fan during play, but not all of it makes it. So, the difference here seems that in a DM driven game, those bits are retained, but need to be teased out by reviewing old gameplay or notes, whereas in player driven games those bits are discarded and might as well never exist.  Your examples about the Elf and the watering hole, for instance.  Had a player never presented the idea that the Elf stole the mace, that was a throwaway bit that wouldn't have made it into your ongoing story.  But, since a player did add it in, the Elf becomes a survivor, and is retroactively classified as emergent foreshadowing of future gameplay.  Had the elf not, well, then, it would just be forgotten and become unimportant and never referenced.  It would never have 'survived' to be lauded as an example of great gameplay.  And, I'm sure there's lots of such examples, hence the classification of survivor bias -- judging something only by those examples that survive and succeed, and forgetting all of the bits and pieces that didn't.</blockquote>

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