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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8973271" data-attributes="member: 4937">Agreed.  Although I would say here the rules are probably the least influential part of this.  These things don't really have anything to do with the rules, and they can occur in lot of ways.  For me a lot of this occurs in asking the players about backstories, which is a time that just about game or any style of play you can allow players to inject things into the setting without it being much of a risk.  So you can allow players to inject NPCs, families, factions, deities, cults, whatever into your game and have personalized fronts and allies that will play a role in the future story.  And you don't need rules for that.  But what that to me does is something the opposite of 'no myth'.   This is an opportunity to collaborate on the world's myth.  That opportunity doesn't completely go away after the story starts, but it does get more limited after the game starts because you have to avoid inserts that would be retcons or which would be too important to the story or which would imply PC knowledge that would be problematic.  But it's often OK to allow some injection of player world building at later points.I don't see how there is much difference between the two.   Sooner or later you need enough of the world for the story to take place in, and that implies preexisting stories.  And much of those stories both logically and by story necessity can't be stories the PC took part in, because otherwise there would be no mystery and no exploration.   But whether or not the player has chosen to work with you to insert backstory into the setting, the world is still there for the PC's stories.  And this needs to be true whether or not the player has the slightest idea at the start of what they wanted to accomplish.  Because most of the time, they don't.  And even if they did, they have no more ability than the GM (and indeed much less) to predict and shape how the story goes because well, randomness will happen and discoveries will be made and mistakes will be made and no plan survives contact with the unknown.   Oh dear.  No, the post is asking questions about how things are done without seeming to understand that things are done that way for the simple reason that there isn't an alternative.  I don't think you have any idea just how many systems I have read the rules for.  You'd be much better off assuming that I am aware of the alternatives to fortune mechanics or having a GM or whatever.Yeah.  So what is the fun of inventing the solution to your own puzzle?  You say that I don't need to do those sorts of things, but you don't really produce alternatives.Because at this point we're like 8 or 9 bounties into the campaign and I'm trying continually to avoid the routine that you'd have if you approached this entirely from a realistic perspective.  Realistically, most bounties wouldn't be all that interesting.  There wouldn't be a story.  They wouldn't play out as great TV episodes.  I'm continually throwing twists at the players.  In this particular circumstance the Prefect has agreed to write out the Writ of Remandation and pay a bounty if the PC's will provide the criminal.  So the PC's find themselves playing the unusual role of 'local sheriff' while otherwise doing the usual things that they would do to hunt down a bounty, only this time they don't have a puck and a face they are looking for.  They still have their Imperial Peace Keeping License, and they are still doing all the same things they normally do, just this time they actually have magisterial authority - something that they've wanted at times in prior adventures but haven't had.  In some senses, this is fulfilling a bit of a power trip/fantasy that the players previously had, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could just arrest people?"Fundamentally, that's not that strong.  That's in total just about the same as my session zero where we discussed concepts for a new campaign and agreed that it would be Bounty Hunters.  If the system was Blades, we'd still have a Crew of Bounty Hunters.  Sure.  And if the players had said we all want to be Jedi Survivors and made appropriate PC's then that would have had the same effect and I would have made a completely different campaign with completely different adventures.Again, that's not that strong.  Yes, it encourages or even forces players to do that in way that most games don't, and yes, I only had one player in this campaign bother to make a backstory at all.  But if players wanted to bring in contacts, friends, and enemies I would have totally been on board with that.  I've done it for prior campaigns, so it's not even like these players didn't realize that was an option.  It's just not a priority for this group.I mean he could, but he's just not supposed to.  But this is so weak, because it's not like if we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and the group decided to be smugglers and a player inserted backstory for a character that made them enemies of the Red Saches gang that I'd ignore that and wouldn't let it shape the campaign.  Regardless of the system, the players can make their own fronts, collectively or individually before play.  That's great, but then I'm still the one that has to bring that to life.   Nothing has changed much between systems for me here.  There are some changes Blades brings about, player driven flashbacks for example and concrete ways to describe the groups growing influence in the downtime minigames between heists, and yeah without writing in your own minigame tracking influence like that is hard in systems that don't explicitly support that minigame.  You can fudge it without a minigame, but minigames do make that sort of thing more compelling. I could keep going, but your examples to me don't really demonstrate to me a lot of change from what I'm already doing in games.Yeah, and the result in my experience is always bland shallow games filled with incoherence and illusionism and ultimately for me a distinct feeling for me as a player that have no real power over anything because the GM feels impowered to metagame.  And if the GM's metagaming, you got no agency and very little impact over the story.I consider myself a pretty darn creative person.  You can look back through old threads were people ask me for creative content and what I generate for them as evidence of that claim.  There are probably people more creative than I am, but I've never met a single person creative enough to wing a story at any depth without extensive preparation.   I know that claim offends people who say that they are doing that, but until they actually demonstrate it to me I'm just not going to believe it.   And particularly in an RPG, where you are the GM inserting the fictional positioning and consequences into play at every turn, if you didn't actively limit your power by pre-establishing some truths that constrain what you can do, well I don't by that the players have any choices at all.  It's all Schrodinger's Setting at that point, painted as serves the GM's ideas of what the story should be from moment to moment.   If you don't have prep, literally nothing can happen except what you want to have happen.</blockquote>

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