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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543204" data-attributes="member: 4937">With no intention to be hurtful, that's disingenuous.  I understand the stand you are making, but there is no such thing as a DM who isn't making things happen.  You may be trying your best to minimize your own agency and maximize the player agency, but even minimizing their own agency the GM is shaping events in a fiat manner based on whim and preference.  It's not a matter of whether you do or don't do these things, but what techniques you use to ensure player agency despite doing them.Setting up a world filled with NPCs with their own motives and devices and playing them out can be part of a pattern of play that allows for restricting your own agency as GM while granting it to the players, but it is still a means of making things happen.  You're still crafting a story, even if you limit the resources of NPCs to things you've fore ordained or which fit to the demographics and realism of the setting.  Moreover, there is no such thing as a GM who doesn't use coincidence to their own advantage for ensuring a story happens.  No GM is fully realistic - at least no good GM - and says that as is realistic, nothing happens.  Rather, all GMs are like the writer of a Batman comic book.  If the PCs hide in an alley, then they will witness a mugging.  Things coincidentally happen in front of the PCs rather than where they couldn't react to them because that keeps things happening.  And that is making things happen.This even applies to railroading.  There is no such thing as a GM who doesn't using techniques for railroading, even if they aren't conscious of doing so or have never thought about their process of play in those terms.  I recognize that most good GMs are very consciously trying to not railroad their PCs and so get quite offended when I point this out, but railroading is always a spectrum between minimal railroading and maximal railroading.  There is always some compromise you have to make in reality to deal with the unreality of the world and the need for the game to be fun.</blockquote>

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