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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7646286" data-attributes="member: 4937">The only definition you gave is this one: "And note that curate means to act as a curator, which means you have the duty to preserve and care for a thing."  This is a circular definition that gives me no concrete details, and I still don't know what the "thing" I'm supposed to be curating is (though my best guess is "story", since that is what a DM is supposed to be curating according to you).  It appears to be some term of art, but I have presumed that since you have defined it by referencing itself that whatever the term of art is it can't be too divorced from its dictionary definition.  Backing up from your definition I see only a bunch of axiomatic assertions as evidence which I disagree with, both that they are evidence of the thing and that they are factual.For example, even if I agreed with you that fiat rulings were an especial part of D&D (and I don't), it would not perforce follow that these decisions were being made for the purpose of curating a story.Even if I agreed "DM decides" exists as a trump mechanism, I would not need to agree that D&D especially relies on it compared to any other game or that the heavy hand of the DM was the normal way to adjudicate D&D.You say, "When I run D&D, there has to be some form of story already built..." you are asserting only something about how you play.  I have seen D&D run on many occasions with very limited preparation.  I don't necessarily agree with limited prep for any game system but it is a valid style of play and D&D can and often is ran that way.   Moreover, even to the extent that D&D does encourage heavy preparation, it doesn't necessarily follow that that preparation constitutes a "story" much less that that story is actively curated in play in order to protect it.You then say, "This is further reinforced by the fact that the mechanics of D&D do not do effective reinforcement of complications -- there's no built in play spiral."  This may be true, but this is an argument that D&D doesn't have curation rather than one that shows that it does.  Any sort of built in reinforcement of complications or built in play spiral indicates a system built to protect a certain sort of story.  The absence of one is not proof that the system requires curation, but on the contrary evidence that the system doesn't consider curation an important thing for the GM to be doing.But probably the most ludicrous evidence you offer is the claim: "So, the DM has to curate the story in some manner to ensure that prep is useful and that play proceeds in useful directions."What?  I mean, how in the heck have I been playing D&D for 30 plus years and been doing it so wrong, or at least so wrong by your standards.  Sometimes I wish that as a DM I was validated in curating the story so that my preparation is useful as you imagine that it is.  I don't know how many times I've done 10 or 20 hours of preparation, only for the player's to jump left rather than right or go off on some highly unexpected direction and then I'm spending the whole session improvising as my carefully crafted preparations become more and more irrelevant.  I've built dungeons the PC's decide not to enter, and prepared a dungeon by the three clue rule in a mystery that the PC's decided to just burn down rather than investigate.  I've had side plots neglected or abandoned more times than I can count, and PC's latch on to plots and plans of their own devising that I'd never anticipated.  But so what?  That's normal as I imagine many GMs will attest.  That's expected.  That's the way things normally work, or perhaps even should work because that means the players have agency.   How many times have I said, "If you want to run a Sandbox, you have to prepare more material than you will actually use."?   And even then, be prepared to improvise content on the fly because you'll never have enough content - the player's will always find the edges of the map and always go into the blank areas.   I wish that I could guarantee that play always goes in useful directions, but at some point either you have to let the PC's fail or else they have no agency, so you let them hit dead ends, die, and generally ruin whatever story they had been producing with actions that no novelist would ever validate as useful to a story.Whatever I'm curating in this manner it isn't "story", nor does it in any fashion look like the sort of thing that you say is baked in.  It might be curating something (a setting?), although I must be a terrible curator considering the havoc I let the player's wreck on it.  No museum curator would look at the wreckage they leave behind and hire me to protect his treasures, but that is because my treasures are not a story or even a setting.But regardless, all your assertions about the absolute and objective nature of D&D, are just so many claims about how you see D&D, or how you run D&D.  And even with respect to the rules of D&D, it's particularly tricky to say that anything is heavily baked in because D&D typically does not hard define it's own processes of play, and even if 4e and 5e tend to be more 'modern' with respect to defining those processes of play, at the same time (and this is especially true of 5e) the game intends to be accommodating to a very wide number of different styles.</blockquote>

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