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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7099061" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] - the word "story" can have (at least) two meanings. It can refer to any narrated sequence of events. Or, it can mean a story in something like the literary sense - dramatic need, rising action, complication, climax etc.In the first sense, even Andy Warhol's Empire or Sleep has a story: "the sleeper is still there, sleeping"; "he's still there, sleeping"; etc. But in the second sense there is no story (which is part of the point of those films, as far as Andy Warhol was concerned).I'm sure this is true for you. I'm not stating principles that are universal. I'm stating the principles that govern a particular, fairly well-known (but I think not that well-known on ENworld) approach to RPGing - what Eero Tuovinen calls "the standard narratiistic model".That doesn't put the players in control of the story. By analogy: a farmer sows seeds. And waters them, and weeds the fields. But the farmer is not in control of the yield. Other factors are also at work (eg the weather; the quality of the soil; animals that might eat the growing plants; etc).The players control their PC responses, and they establish the dramatic need that governs framing. But the GM actually does the framing; and, when checks fail, the GM narrates the consequences. Thus, no one is in control of the story. It is emergent.The OP gives a clear example: the (small slice of story) described in the OP is this:A snake-handling shaman, under the control of a dark naga, hopes to capture a powerful mage and take said mage back to the naga, so said mage's blood can be spilled in sacrifice to the spirits. But, before the shaman could get to the mage - who was lying unconscious in a room in another mage's tower - an assassin decapitated said mage in an act of revenge. The shaman, seeing this occur, thinks "All that blood is flowing away, and my master wants it. Is there a vessel I can catch it in?" Looking around the room, he sees such a vessel, and uses it to catch the blood.That's the story. It is a story in the second of the two sense I identified: it has dramatic need, rising action, complication, a degree of climax and resolution.Who was in control of it?No single individual. The player of the shaman has a PC with the Belief that he will get the mage for his master. The player chose to have the shaman try to enter the tower to take the unconscious mage away. A series of failed checks (including, in the end, an opposed Speed check between PCs and assaasin) resulted in the assassin - played by me, the GM - getting there first. The player decided that the PC would look around for a vessel. A successful check meant that he found one.That is "the standard narrativistic model" at work: the players providing dramatic need and making choices; the GM framing scenes that include complications (like assassins trying to kill the mage); dice being used to resolve action declarations, with successes realising player (and PC) intent, and failures leading to intent-defeating consequences narrated by the GM.I call this "player driven" because it is the player-supplied dramatic need and the players' choices about action declarations that drive things. But that doesn't mean the players control the story. They don't. No one does. And we don't want anyone to control it - that's why we roll the dice.</blockquote>

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