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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8973379" data-attributes="member: 4937">Celebrim's Second Law of RPGs states, "How you prepare to play a game and how you think about a game has a bigger influence on the game than the rules."  I'm rather fond of that observation, and I find it holds.  Would it?  I think you get things backwards.  Detailed monster stats and spell effects are the product of how people played D&D and not the result of it.  People made the maps before they made the other things.   They needed the other things because they had maps.  Besides, those are the easy parts of prep.  Most of the work doesn't go into those things for most of the things I do in most systems.  Procedures of play is what isn't written down in the rules.  It's things that vary from whether or not you count the roll if the dice falls off the table, to whether or not the DM draws maps, to whether or not PC's write out 4 page backstories, to whether you RP in 1st person or 3rd person, to what filters does the group apply to determine what a valid proposition is and how skill rolls are called at the table.  It's a thing very different than the rules and which most tables are not even consciously aware of.  Most games don't actually change play by changing the rules, but by changing how people think about playing.  The two aren't separatable.  There isn't this either/or distinction you are trying to make.  Imagine Star Wars as a campaign.  Do you think it matter's if Luke's player knows that Darth Vader is his father from the beginning?  Which do you think is more exciting from the player's perspective, setting up all his own story beats or discovering them as he explores the setting?   I think it's better if the player just signals his orphan status as an opportunity to explore fairy tale themes, and then let's the GM come up with his past generally with the consent of the player - "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you want me to mess with you?", sort of thing.   And I really hope that the player said 10 out 10, because making Leia a secret sister is so Greek Tragedy, "Yikes!".   Again, the two aren't separable.  The setting backstory isn't the opposite of player empowerment.  What the characters do about whatever is always what an RPG is about.  But, finding out what their characters are and what they care about is an aesthetic of play that 80% of gamers do not give a flip about.  Most players have no interest in roleplaying out their feelings in melodramatic scenes and are already pretty sure what they care about and aren't interested in particularly in RPing out moral or ethical angst, or deciding what relationship that they are going to have with other characters (PC's or NPC's).   Most players do not want that as a focus of play.  But regardless of what system you are playing, all players have access to that sort of RP if that's what they want.  If your aesthetic enjoyment is exploration of character, and you are in a group - like say Critical Roles group - where you have quality improv actors that can do those scenes, well go for it.   But you as a GM aren't really in control of that.  You aren't the person animating the characters.  You don't get to create Raistlin and give him personality and drive and put him into those scenes.  That's on the player.Your improv when you one page no longer covers the questions you need to answer and you have to answer things on the fly. I'm not even going to derail the response by dignifying that.  But if you'd back up and look at some of my specific objections rather than assuming I don't know things, you might have more interesting things to say.   The fact you immediate go on to say, "I didn't suggest that anyone should do that.", just tells me you are too busy playing "gotcha" to even follow along.So?  What's your point?  You think that's not trad RP?  You think that's not the result of trad preparation?  You think that's not the result of GM driven storytelling?In fact, that's hardcore GM driven storytelling. I have a player that would get furious over me pulling that stunt early in a campaign because it works entirely against the session zero preparation.  This is something we joke about a lot in the current campaign - "The Mandalorian" is a show about a bounty hunter that doesn't actually follow the character until the end of his bounty hunting career.  It never actually bothers to try to explore the premise, and instead becomes a quest-based fantasy right off the bat.  If I pulled the stunt of promising a Bounty Hunting game after table agreement that that is what we wanted to do, and then in the first adventure put the characters in a moral dilemma where they either had to give up bounty hunting and go rogue or else be complete SOBs, I'd have several very unhappy players.   They'd get over it.  They'd go along with me screwing the campaign over like that.  But it wouldn't make them very happy. I think I know what my players are trying to achieve better than you do.  There is no disagreement here over that though.  It's not a point of debate or something that separates your position from tradition RPing.Backstory is character sheet.  And you can put Reads Latin or History on your character sheet, but it's up to the GM usually to figure out how to make that relevant.  Sure.  But I find your argument increasingly incoherent.Then you'd have strongly GM driven play, or at the least, it would be at least as strongly GM driven as my play is.This is such an arbitrary distinction.  As for Temple of Elemental Evil, I'm not particularly fond of the adventure as written, as it's a pretty simplistic dungeon crawl.  There is a thread around here somewhere where I talk about changes I'd make to the adventure that would allow it to achieve it's aesthetic of play, but also provide for the sort of complex literary scenarios that would allow for more RPing.  Whenever a GM is called to invent something mid-play, there is always the conscious or unconscious temptation to invent what the GM thinks would be good for the game.  For example, if the game has a big combat encounter, and the PC's are doing well, the GM experiences the temptation to say invent some reinforcements or some new challenge in the middle of the combat to make it exciting because the combat was supposed to be dramatic.  Games the strongly encourage the GM to invent things on the fly tend to strongly become dependent on Illusionism, where the game the players think they are playing isn't the game they are actually playing.  As an example of Illusionism, imagine if the BBEG had no hit points but was always defeated on the seventh round of combat.  It's Illusionism if the GM keeps asking for damage inflicted and marking it down as if that was relevant to the game actually being played.  There is a whole theory of how to be a good GM that depends heavily on perpetrating those sorts of deceptions on the players.</blockquote>

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