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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7105377" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Got it.I'll start with these statements:a) Yesb) There are a lot of ways to make something interesting besides "something's wrong" and I don't see a need to limit it to just that option. However, there is always something interesting going on, but it's not always immediately evident. This doesn't mean that I pre-determine something (although I often do), but it plays off the first point - sometimes the town isn't important to them. Sometimes it's just a place to rest, recover, take a break, and reprovision for example. c) This depends on the characters. Not every adventure is NPC driven, although that's always an option and a lot of fun.d) Totally agree. Although the town and the NPCs, etc. have their own stories. And while I agree that as a DM I will obviously provide things in the world, and they will sometimes initiate (or imply) conflict, I object to having to always drive toward conflict. (And I don't see how you can ever resolve all conflict in a town.)e) Use what they've gained lost and given - yes, listen to the PCs to find ways to build on the stories. But as a DM I'm not pushing them to anything. It's up to the PCs to determine where they go next. Some (NPC driven) story arcs will be more compelling toward a certain direction, but not always.Point a) specifically says the DM should follow the lead of the players about what's important and not. Moreso I think the players should be the primary authors of the story - as Eero pointed out, the DM is in control of the backstory and setting, the players in control of the story. Steps b) and c) continue in that approach, but then d) and e) instruct the DM to drive the story.You asked about "realism fidelity" and "table time/on-screen time exclusively spent on 'the action' "The "realism fidelity" is, at least for me, in-world consistency. I do have a lot of rules that relate to "realism" but they aren't related to the story directly so don't really apply here. From what I understand about a lot (but not all) Story Now games is that they are largely self-contained. That is, they aren't part of an ongoing campaign. So whatever comes up in the course of that game, of however many sessions, isn't relevant once you start a new game (story). But if the characters, locations, NPCs, and such continue from one campaign to another, that consistency can become more important. Some people won't care - if you play the HotDQ AP and then move onto OotA AP in 5e D&D, you don't really have to have consistency. But they are also largely self-contained, and they players will probably start with new characters for the second adventure.For somebody like me, who had been running a continuous campaign from the release of the Forgotten Realms in 1987 until 4e came out, 4e really created problems. I kept up with the published timeline, with the various story arcs from novels, etc. occurring (mostly in the background), etc. So when they jumped ahead 100 years, it totally screwed existing campaigns like mine. Do we jump ahead the 100 years and drop all of our existing story arcs? And since the timeline has detailed some major events in the near future for us, do we incorporate those? In the end, once 5e came out, we've jumped ahead (made easier by new groups of players), but it was pretty annoying. As a result, though, I've also taken advantage of the shift to bring things closer to the way my campaign was during AD&D rules, and have modified the 5e rules to support that.In and of itself, the Story Now approach makes for an interesting and fun game. And there really isn't a reason why I can't do the same thing in D&D. Sure, the rules don't specifically support it in the same way, in that the rules don't make you address the fiction directly as they are more mechanical in nature. But they don't prevent me from doing it either. But the instructions (all of the ones you list above) can easily be worked into the game.So what I think I'm finding is that, for me, the "problem" with Story Now games is that they are very specialized. I like long form campaigns. I like to see the same group of characters work through life, growing and changing on the way. Where the journey is as important as the goal. With an ever-growing cast provided by the players, some of which relate to other characters/stories, others that don't. Story Now games are designed to be a movie - or a more short form approach. The focus is generally on conflict, a specific story line, and maintains much closer focus on that, since it's got a much shorter amount of time to address it than a series that has 22 episodes a year for 10 years.Most of my campaigns literally run for years. Players have multiple characters, and NPCs or events that happened several years ago can come back into play. While I use a published campaign world, a significant portion of the organizations, villains and other NPCs are all directly from prior campaigns. The world is populated by people the players "know." In many cases these are older PCs that are no longer in active service (although they can be). The canvas is different. It's more of a Tolkien approach, where he was as interested in the linguistics (not us - beyond me), and the history and world itself as the stories within it. My primary focus as the DM is providing an environment where the players can write whatever story they'd like. The world is the way it is because of the things that have come before. And figuring out what came before is also interesting.From the character perspective, it gives you time to let the character grow. To find out what makes them tick, and makes them different from your other characters. Not that you can't do that in Story Now, but you're dealing with a shorter time-table, and a more intense scenario usually.The Story Now approach often has the same problem that I have with a lot of current TV series. For example, Hawaii Five-O - my wife loves it. Except that every single week you have a small group of law enforcement involved in large gun battles with villains toting automatic weapons. In Hawaii. Why would anybody vacation there? The place is obviously crawling with out-of-control criminal elements.It's ludicrous. The number of times law enforcement gets into gun battles with automatic weapon-toting criminals is quite low across the entire country. And it makes news when it happens. Usually national news. That type of show strains credibility with me and is another type of "realism fidelity."It doesn't mean you can't have a great story in all that. Of course you can. I just prefer that I don't have that type of story every week. The Story Now approach is very good at what it does. I think it would be a much better fit than earlier RPG attempts at James Bond. Mission-based would fit very well with the narrower focus of Story Now. Traditionally, Bond hasn't explored much about the character, but the last few movies have been more interested in how the job, the world, etc. weighs on him. Firefly, being episodic in nature and where the setting changes in each episode (or it's within the self-contained setting of the ship itself. Star Trek, etc. All of those would be well suited to that style. Really anything where the setting serves only as a backdrop. Where the characters don't really get involved in the politics and things like that. What it doesn't do is long-form dungeon-crawl, hex-crawl, how do the characters fit into the world as a whole approach. It is, in fact, often their stated goal to avoid all of that.But I'm interested in more than that. Our campaigns have long-term story arcs for each character. But there are many short story arcs, and story arcs that tie the characters together, of course. But then sometimes they don't. My campaigns aren't party-based. They can be, like Fellowship of the Ring. But then, like that book, they sometimes split up. Permanently. They go separate ways. We play through their stories too if we want. Sometimes it's just a character that they are ready to retire, so the player and I work out what their goals are going forward, and they become an NPC. Until they decide to pick them up again. If ever. At any given time with say, six players, there are a good dozen or so story arcs occurring. And a given session might not address any of them directly. And they aren't all "conflicts" in the sense that we're always trying to ramp up the action. I don't drive them toward a specific story or plot, even if it evolves between us as a group. They have lots of stories and plots, and pick what and when they want to engage in any given plot.They aren't always "conflict" - could be mystery, could be comedy, whatever. Police and legal procedurals are interesting to me because they can cover a whole lot of ground in the human condition. In the world, in the stories, and in the characters. You can do this in Story Now games, but it's not optimized for that. In general, their focus is on a single type of story, with rules that strongly direct the story (or the DM) to create that type of story.Most of the elements and concepts from Story Now games are solid and helpful. And the more I'm going through this thread, the more I'm finding that I use (or can use) a lot of the techniques. More importantly, to me anyway, is that they are also quite limiting in their approach. They tell one type of story very, very well. And they either don't support other types of stories, or they do it relatively poorly. (Does that mean it can't be done? Of course not.)Table-time spent on the action is directly related to the type of story. Assuming a drama, hour-long TV shows spend more time on character development, outside of the main setting (police station, hospital, law firm, fire department, etc.) and in. They have the ability to dig a bit deeper than a 1/2 hour show that has to maintain a tighter focus. But I like dynamics. The periods between the action enhance the action, make it more intense, but in a different way.Can you have a long-term campaign with a Story Now system? Dungeon World seems to be interested in the same type of worlds and general concept as D&D. But it doesn't encourage anything outside of the immediate story to be addressed in any way. It doesn't encourage cataloging and recording the places and people of the world for future use, or delving into the history, events, and ongoing plots that are (currently) independent of the PCs. Consistency isn't as important as the current story. That's fine. The goals are different. They just don't readily support my goals and needs.One thing I can say, is that there is nothing within your description, or really the descriptions of anybody else's games that I object to. And I like a lot of the ideas and stories themselves. The only thing I do object to from time to time is how the story is generated. Like in the OP [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] made a Perception check to determine whether a vessel was there or not. Personally, I don't mind randomly determining whether or not a vessel was there, although as I noted it really probably didn't need to be a random check. But the idea that a characters Perception check, which is designed to determine if they notice something is there, as opposed to determine whether something is there or not, rubs me the wrong way. It's the same thing that bothers a number of folks as the idea that the act of searching for a secret door determines whether the door is actually there or not.Now [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is used to the Story Now approach, which is more concerned with the scene or goal, rather than a mechanical task. And if everybody is on the same page with that, then allowing the Perception check to determine that the vessel is there isn't an issue. And there's no reason in a Story Now game that he can't decide that it just doesn't belong there, in which case it's not there regardless of the check. But to a lot of us, those are two different things: Is there a secret door present? And if so, can the character find it? One is a determination of setting, not story, in my world. The second is a use of a skill. For the original example, it was a question of story.I like to treat my campaign like the real world. The world, as it is, is independent of the actions of the NPCs. And it's independent upon the actions of the PC (me). When I'm developing the campaign, I treat them as such. The stories can act upon the world, and the world can act upon the story, etc. That doesn't mean that I can't add a secret door if it seems appropriate in that location. But the answer is based on entirely different questions than whether it would serve the story here. Why would there be a secret door here? That's really the question that needs to be answered, not whether the character successfully detected an as-yet nonexistent secret door.Is [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] wrong? Of course not. We just have different goals, and different approaches in reaching those goals.As i'm writing this, my wife is watching The Secretary, a TV show about the Secretary of State if you're not familiar with it. So far (nearly a third of the episode) we've seen the Secretary of State for all of about 2 minutes. So far this episode is about a number of different plots, and multiple characters. I'm sure some of those will circle back to the Secretary, but not all of them. This is exactly the sort of thing we enjoy. With some of them carrying to future episodes, some not, and so on. Ironically, I'm not a fan of spotlighting, however, where one episode focuses on one character, etc. But depending on what's going on, the session will sometimes do that naturally - where the players choose to focus on something that's important to one character in particular, rather than me as the DM.So for me, the Story Now techniques are a a great addition to the DM's toolbox. I'll continue to try to learn more so I can incorporate them into my campaign. But it's one tool, or perhaps group of tools, that will join the others in my toolbox, to be used where and how it works in my campaign.</blockquote>

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