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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8970903" data-attributes="member: 4937">I strongly disagree with this description.  The goal is to put players into the position of being characters within a story, and definitely not the audience.  Relatively linear stories, especially those of the narrow, broad, narrow structure I like to tell, do not turn the players into non-participants.  Even very linear stories don't have to turn the participants into a passive audience.So that may well be your Platonic Idea of a great RPG campaign but understand it is probably far from most player's idea of an ideal good time.  For as long as I've been reading about gaming, there has always been this faction that has argued that open ended, (what's now called) "no myth", player driven, character driven RP is the best form of game and that in fact, that's what the players really want and bad GMs who are frustrated novelists are just keeping them down.  And in 40 years of RPing, that has absolutely never been my experience.  The vast majority of players both from their observed in game preferences and even surveys of "What do you want the next campaign to be like?" prefer games that are driven by GM narrative, GM created obstacles, and GM driven stories.  They do want the freedom to find their own ways around those obstacles, to make their own plans, and respond to the narrative how they want to, but they do not - decidedly do not - want to put in the effort to make their own fun.  I always try to leave room for player freedom, and frequently how the PC's go from A->B is not something I ever anticipated.  They will in the micro level always throw me curveballs.  But I've never once had players that wanted to actually lay their own rails and invent their own goals and play in the sandbox.  My suspicion is that if you have those sorts of players, you will know it and if you open the gates then off they will go.  And likewise, if you don't have those kinds of players, then no number of open gates is going to convince them to get off the pasture or away from the comforts and ease of discovering the story I've imagined for them to play through.So the thing is, ultimately if you want a player driven campaign, it's ultimately up to the players, and to having the sort of players that both want to drive the story and actually have the ability to do so.  And for me, they also would have to have enough skill at creating motives for themselves, and planning things, and setting up interesting goals that I could play along with it, riff off of it, and enjoy what they are doing.  For example, if they just want to on a hex crawl safari and it never comes more than kill the monster of evening and take its stuff, I'm going to get bored quickly.  But if they have something actually interesting they want to do, and enough of their own ideas of how to get there, then I'd be happy to riff off that myself.  It's just in 40 years of gaming absolutely never happened with any players I've had.I particularly want to caution against the false idol that is "no myth".  It's one thing to let the players drive the story.  It's another thing to use this as an excuse for doing no work yourself.One particular problem I would have with the idea of a player driven campaign, is that I think it's probably suited only to tables with 1-3 players, and not the 4-6 players that have been more the norm for my gaming.  The number of players you have at your table is the biggest restriction on the sort of games you can run successfully.  The more players you have, the less the game by necessity can be about exploration of character and individual characters story arcs and goals and the more you have to have some overriding and overarching unity of purpose.  Either that, or you have to have an entire crew of players that are both talented enough thespians to entertain everyone else at the table, and also patient enough to just sit and watch for long periods of time.   The problem I foresee with player driven and character driven games is that above about 3 players, you'll almost certainly develop a lack of unity in the goals as each player separately pursues their own story arc - essentially you end up with a bunch of players who want to ride railroads in different directions.   I've seen this happen, and you can somewhat get around it with troupe play, but as a third constraint, the campaign will suck up more hours than most adults have to spend.  And on that topic, if you really want to run a sandbox well, I think the fundamental thing you have to remember is a well-run sandbox always requires more work than running a linear game.  You have to do more preparation work and not less preparation work.  Because by definition the GM running a sandbox is willing to prepare a lot of things with the expectation that they will never use them.  The amount of understanding of the setting that you need to run it so that it's not an empty rowboat world, however that depth of understanding is made and recorded is just going to be a ton of work.</blockquote>

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