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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7646215" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is IMO a fairly normal situation that arises in D&D play at any higher level than say a tournament module.  An assertion is being made that in some fashion D&D needs to have the direction that the play takes "curated" so that the DM has to just decide what happens. I flat refuse this description, and further to the extent that I could agree with this description (for some less obvious value of "curation" such as just term of art for fiat decision making) D&D no more depends on "curation" than any other game which has a single secret keeper and referee.  As a DM I often have a general sense of the sort of things that might happen, but often as not none of the things that I thought might happen come to pass.  I really don't know where play is going to take us, and sometimes this includes play in as constrained of an environment as a dungeon.  I could use railroading techniques to try to get what I want to happen to happen, but most of the time there is not actually anything I want to have happen enough to use those techniques and as I've previously written, a little of those techniques go a long way and it is a mark of good GMing to use them sparingly.  The DM in D&D in a sense has no stake in the game, or at least his stakes in the game are low.  He has no motivation to curate it.  He's neither supposed to be preventing or creating TPKs, nor deciding what sort of story should happen.  By creating a myth and a setting and demographics, he is constraining himself to only use very limited resources so that he has only limited in game resources to force anything to happen anyway.  If play begins to go in a direction he didn't want, he has little reason to try to prevent it.   Thus, the story that is created is not under his control.   If the dice go bad and the bad guy goes down like a chump, that's just what happens.  He ought not rescue the bad guy so that the fight is more satisfyingly dramatic.  If on the other hand the PC's dice go cold, it's not up to him to cause everything to fail forward because that would make a better story.  The PC's must deal with the failure as it is being dealt to him.   The DM doesn't change the fiction to suit the story.  He allows the story to evolve from the PC's actions and fortune.  He plays NPCs as if he was a neutral referee, trying to avoid metagaming and acting only according to the NPC's preestablished motivations and abilities.This is one of the least curated styles I'm aware of in any sense I would understand the word "curated".  Yet I've never noted it for an inability to produce dramatic situations and complex moral delimmas or changes of viewpoint or motivation.  All that will happen naturally in any suitably complex fiction where the PCs have limited information.   I don't need mechanics to force the PCs to change sides.  Things like "Oh my gosh, the polite neighbor whom I've had such cordial relations with is actually a necromancer performing dark experiments in his basement.", "Oh my gosh, the quest giver is actually working for team evil.", "Oh my gosh, this bandit we've been sent to kill is basically Robin Hood" happens all the time simply because the PC's have limited information and must make decisions in the face of limited information.By contrast, any game without an established myth secret to and separate from the PC's, but which by social contract remains unchanged even if it is leading to a result the secret keeper didn't want, is inherently one which is heavily curated, since the secret keeper is unable to act without bias since the fiction is being created and introduced all the time.   There are no notes to establish what is true created before play began and which obligate the keeper to adhere to the limited resources which were allocated when the keeper also had limited knowledge.  In a game where fiction is established continuously, the keeper always introduces fiction in more or less perfect knowledge of the situation.  Thus, anything but heavy curation is impossible.   To make matters worse, many games of this sort openly exhort the keeper to introduce fiction precisely with the motive of making for a better story, which is simply alternative language for saying "the story the keeper wants".  In my view, this is never balanced by sharing with the players any finite amount of narrative control, since the keepers narrative control is not only both infinite in fact, but in this structure infinite in practice.I've attracted a bunch of people who are defending their preferred style of play in a larger sense from perceived slights, and I wish they wouldn't.  All I'm asserting is that often the style of game that games encourage you to produce is very different than the style of game that they actually support.  There isn't necessarily anything wrong with what is being called "curation" but I certainly don't agree with the claim this game requires curation and this game doesn't, and to the extent that I do I tend to reverse the perception - Narrativist games are defined by being high curation, hopefully but not always mitigated by mechanics or a table agreement to jointly share that curation.   You are jointly curating a story.  But, for example, one of the online DMs I admire - the now Ennie Award winning Seth Skorkowsky - plays his games, including games like Call of Cthulhu, with what I consider a fairly high level of curation relative to my normal practice.  It's in no way a bad thing, and for the most part I tend to approve of his reasoning and have in the past done similar GM tricks to achieve results, maintain balance, and keep the story going forward - but on the other hand neither do I pretend that that is a low curation neutral referee stance toward the game either.   Regardless of what is meant by "curation" though, it is a very low curation stance to decide that since it was established in some fashion that this priestess was a virgin of the goddess of marital loyalty protecting some vow of chastity outside of marriage that the proposition to seduce her would be generally more difficult than usual, and even might be impossible at the current power level of the campaign.  (Obviously, if your PC's are deities, then what is possible is a rather different question, but even for a deity this might be rather more difficult than usual.)  How much force you have to assert to protect the story so that said priestess is only seduced in a situation which would not suspend disbelief is perhaps a matter of curation, but it's not a contradiction to have rules that make that difficult and also at the same time to have as a secret keeper relative disinterest over whether it occurs or not since neither outcome represents the story you didn't want or the story you wanted.</blockquote>

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