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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5600885" data-attributes="member: 42582">True. I missed that (although I notice that I did quote it! oops).The key words/phrases I was picking up on were "hook" and "bad guys". If the GM chooses the hook and the adversaries, then the GM has gone a long way to determining what the story will be.The contrast between this approach to running a game (which is the standard approach of eg every WotC module I've looked at) and the one that KM describes, wherein the GM introduces adversity in response to the hooks provided by the players, is not a trivial one in my experience. Doing it KM's way opens up the door to player-driven but non-exploratory play (ie narrativism of some form or other). But GM-provided hooks plus bad guys tend to lead either to player-driven exploratory play (the players have their PCs wander the world until they find some hooks and/or adversaries that they want to engage) or a GM-driven storyline (adventure-path style play) which can easily (although by no means inevitably) collapse into railroading.I can't give you a text that says "action resolution is the GM deciding what would make for a good story".But the 3.5 DMG does say, at page 18:Terrible things can happen in the game because the dice just go awry. Everything might be going fine, when suddenly the players have a run of bad luck. A round later, half the party's down for the count and the other half almost certainly cant take on the foes that remain. If everyone dies, the campaign might very well end then and there, and that's bad for everyone. . . it's certainly within your rights [as DM] to sway things one way or another to keep people happy or keep things running smoothly. . . A good rule of thumb is that a character shouldn't die in a trivial way because of some fluke of the dice unless he or she was doing something really stupid at the time.I think there is something similar in the 4e DMG, but I can't find it at present. But in relation to 4e player books, there is a very telling (in my view) shift between the PHB and the later Rules Compendium. At page 8, the PHB says of the GM that "When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story" - fairly uncontentious stuff in a game with a GM. But at page 9, the RC (in a section that is largely cut-and-pasted from the PHB) alters this to read "The DM decides how to apply the game rules and guides the story. If the rules don't cover a situation, the DM determines what to do. At times, the DM migh alter or even ignore the result of a die roll if doing so benefits the story."In my view, this is one of several signs in Essentials that WotC is pushing back towards more traditional approaches to play. I'm pretty confident there was text in the 2nd ed rulebooks about not permitting the dice to derail the story, and White Wolf had their "golden rule" about the GM suspending the rules in the interests of story.All this stuff, about the GM suspending the action resolution mechanics in the interests of the story, is pretty common (if in my view tending to produce bad play experiences). The effect of this advice is for the GM to shape the story, rather than the players' choices as resolved via the action resolution mechanics of the game. The player becomes a contributor of narration and colour. Hence my reply to Pawsplay - because the implication of his comment is that this advice to GM's about fudging in the interests of story is that it is advice to turn the game from an RPG into something else. Which I think can't be right, given that eg the 2nd ed rulebooks are paradigms of roleplaying game texts.Just be way of elaboration: the difference between this sort of play and illusionist play (or some forms of railroading, for that matter) is that if the party TPKS - or wins easily through cleverness or luck - then those results stand and the GM has to accomodate them.I'm guessing that a lot of adventure paths are run this way.I don't think that what you say about those games is quite right. The goal of play is to produce a good story, but the way this is achieved is for the player to play his/her PC within the scene/context that the GM has provided. The player doesn't have to actively address the metagoal of getting a good story - the idea is that the game design itself will ensure this.A <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">blog that LostSoul likes to link to</a> elaborates on this point:conch-passing lacks many features that are mandatory for different types of roleplaying games, so if your game reduces into conch-passing, you might find that the system no longer adequately supports roleplaying of the sort you wanted. . . many people find conch-passing games to pale next to a proper roleplaying game; the advocacy/referee/antagonism division of responsibilities is simply a more dynamic, interactive, emergent and fun way of crafting stories than undiluted and complete dramatic control for many of us. Authorship is work, advocacy is game. . . Here’s how games like Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, some varieties of Heroquest, The Shadow of Yesterday, Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures and more games than I care to name all work: 1. One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. 2. The rest of the players each have their own characters to play. They play their characters according to the advocacy role: the important part is that they naturally allow the character’s interests to come through based on what they imagine of the character’s nature and background. Then they let the other players know in certain terms what the character thinks and wants. 3. The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end. 4. The player’s task in these games is simple advocacy, which is not difficult once you have a firm character. (Chargen is a key consideration in these games, compare them to see how different approaches work.) The GM might have more difficulty, as he needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences). These games are tremendously fun, and they form a very discrete family of games wherein many techniques are interchangeable between the games. The most important common trait these games share is the GM authority over backstory and dramatic coordination . . . which powers the GM uses to put the player characters into pertinent choice situations. Can you see how this underlying fundamental structure is undermined by undiscretionary use of narrative sharing? The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design . . . And it works, but only as long as you do not require the player to take part in determining the backstory and moments of choice.Now it's true that the author of this blog also says "D&D for instance has nothing to do with the standard narrativist model, but it still sucks for slightly different reasons if you make playing the setting a matter of group consensus". But my own experience is that it's actually not that hard to play a game exemplifying features 1 to 4 above using a mainstream game like D&D, if you have the benefit of the GM guidance of these other games (some of which is handily reproduced by Robin Laws in DMG 2!) and if you work out how to handle the scene transition issues I was talking about upthread (4e facilitates this greatly, even though it is not perfect in this regard).</blockquote>

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