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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5502944" data-attributes="member: 42582">The verbs "create" and "request" in the last sentence of each paragraph aren't quite right.The only plots that happen are plots that the players engage with via their choices. And these only evolve in so far as it is relevant to, and driven by, those engagements.I used to use more general campaign timelines, which would explain how various events would happen according to the passage of ingame time in various regions of the gameworld. But then I noticed (i) that these events really only mattered insofar as they connected to what was actually going on, in play, with the PCs, and (ii) as a GM I wasn't paying any attention to those events other than those that were connected to what was actually going on, in play, with the PCs. So I decided to dispense with the campaign timelines, and just focus on play.An example from my game: I bought a module online after reading a good review - I can't remember it's name - but anyway, it seemed in fact to be somewhat derivative of the old White Dwarf adventure The Lichway (not a criticism, but it would have been good if the reviewer had picked this up), but one thing that was new in it was an NPC who had the power to tell the names of the dead by touching them, and who was commited to burying all the dead to be found on a terrible ancient battlefield.I liked this NPC a lot and had the PCs encounter him while they were making their way to tombs up a ridge which had been the site of a terrible battle in my gameworld. Various hijinks ensued that I won't bore you with. But at the back of my mind is this idea: various beings are trying to learn the Raven Queen's true name - which is a secret - in order to gain power over her;  the Raven Queen is dead - she came to power after dying, going to Nerrul's realm, and overthrowing him; therefore her body is, in principle at least, recoverable; and this NPC could then be used to learn the name from that body. So this suggests a plot by some faction or other - Vecna, Orcus or both (either or both would fit into my game very well, because there is a wizard-invoker of Ioun, Vecna and Erathis, and a cleric and a paladin of the Raven Queen) - to kidnap the NPC, recover the Raven Queen's body, and thereby learn her name.But until a context comes up in which this would be an interesting notion to put into action, I won't be doing anything with the idea. And if and when I do decide to do something with idea, the way that it unfolds will be driven by the way that the players interact with it. It's not about them requesting (or not only), but about them sending signals (with express requests being only a modest contributor to them) of what interests them, what doesn't, and where they want the game to go.The issue here, as I tried to explain in my previous post, is about removing the incentive to expedience at the expense of flair and excitement. I can run games with teleport and divination - I did so for many years in my first long-running Rolemaster campaign. Teleport and divination were mostly stripped out of the second long-running Rolemaster campaign at the request of the players, because they had experienced the sort of issue that I am talking about - that making those powers available created too big a gulf between making choices that were rational from the point of view of the PCs, and choices that actually made for an interesting and engaging game.I don't know about "integrity of the game" - but learning what someone's motivation is by outwitting them in negotiation, and/or scaring them, and/or piecing together various fragments of information, is something my players generally enjoy. Learning by using mind reading is, too often, an anti-climax. There's nothing very dramatic about it. I tend to just use notes that talk about who the different NPCs are and what their relationships are to one another, and what their history is. I've attached a diagram to this post which was actually drawn up my players in our last campaign - an Oriental Adventures-style Rolemaster game. By the end of the campaign they had a better grasp on some of the minutiae then I did! (The black squares represent enemies defeated by the PCs. And the label "so-called heavenly realm" reflects a fundamental feature of the campaign - that the main thematic issue was of the attitude that should be taken towards the heavens, and the gods' plans for and designs upon the world. And some of those boxes are PCs - Hiroshi, Sun Ki, Hidao, Kochi, and 2 members of the Tao clan.)</blockquote>

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