Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8971170" data-attributes="member: 6785785">If the story that the characters are in is not specifically their story... if they can be swapped out for another set of characters with little about the story actually changing... then isn't there an element of separation between that story and the characters by definition? Even if it's true that most players don't want this, so what? This is what a specific poster is saying he'd like to try and do. Who cares what most players want? I'd only worry about [USER=6670763]@Yora[/USER] and their players. It's always amazing to me how the players who don't want to put in any effort always wind up with GMs who know that's what they want! Such a happy circumstance for all involved!Don't you think this is a maybe a chicken or egg type situation? That the expectation that the GM is going to bring the story makes players passive? Or do you think it's passive players that make the GM have to bring the story?Maybe if the mechanics and procedures of play promote player-driven play, then maybe players would become more proactive? And then the more proactive they become, the easier it will be for them to play that way? If the default expectation is that the GM is the one who comes up with a story and the players simply play through the story, why would players expect things to be different? I particularly want to caution anyone reading the above that it's nonsense. I generally like to run a game for 3 or 4 players max, regardless of the system, but that's not always possible. I don't know if I agree with your take here as I've run low-prep games with 5 players and found it to be no more cumbersome than running D&D with that many players. I think part of what helps here is when players actually care about characters other than their own. I think that's easier to do when the character is more than just a collection of combat stats with a coating of personality traits. When their goals are central to play, meaningful to them... when there are actual stakes in what they're trying to do. That allows for more effective spotlight rotation among characters. I've had entire sessions where 3 player characters were never together, and we simply rotated around the table, focusing on each character in turn. It's much easier to maintain engagement when the players have a say in what play is about. This seems pretty self-evident to me. This is simply not true. I had a much harder time running Tomb of Annihilation than I did running my campaign of Spire. I absolutely did not need to prepare a bunch of material that went unused for Spire. Aside from some stat blocks, the only thing I used as prep was a one page relationship map. That's it. There are games that work differently that allow for low prep play that's every bit as engaging as heavy prep. You don't need to do hours of preparation for all games.</blockquote>

Verification