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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9418275" data-attributes="member: 2067">Players come up with quests for their characters often in my games, regardless of the edition. It's not typically very formal, and I don't need to assign levels or anything - the player decides their character has a goal, and pursues it via deciding to take those actions in play. They decide where to go and what goals to pursue. I do let players know that they still need to have characters that are on board for whatever the group is doing, so we don't pull in too many narrative directions at once. And, not every player feels great leaning into this kind of roleplaying. Some prefer to be a little more reactive - game for whatever the current narrative is. An example of that is my gothic fantasy snow white campaign. There's a reason the party is called together, and it defines the arc of the campaign ("steal the crown of the princess of the cursed kingdom for the rat king.") Why the players pursue such a goal is something I explicitly put in their hands, and some are a little reactive, and others are a little more pro-active. I've got one player leaning into the idea of restoring the order of Looking-Glass Knights that once defended the queen, so I'm putting in effort into allowing him to do that through the narrative (there's an NPC he can specifically inspire and forge common cause with). Another is explicitly learning how to become a Thief of Stories, so that element gets a bit more work (through another allied NPC). The party Fighter, though, is just kind of along for the ride, and is having fun being along for the ride. What I find useful for encouraging this is a light touch with the sort of intended campaign arc. Often, I'll even write the arc after the PC's make their party, so I can specifically highlight classes, races, backgrounds, etc. Makes envisioning the path easier, anyway. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Yeah, happens all the time. I encourage a "what would your CHARACTER" do mindset to help get away from the menu of action choices and get more into the land of character goals. Last session, a PC dragged an exploding lightning-ice-golem-thing away from the rest of the party. I've got a halfling often perched on the back of an orc. I don't really need a specific construct like a skill challenge to encourage this. Personally, the skill challenge structure always struck me as over-designed and gamist, so I typically rely more on a call-and-response kind of format where I just ask what the PC wants to do, and then tell them what skill to roll (often using group checks when they all want to do something similar). I don't formally collect player input or suggestions for world elements, but I do work player elements into planning as I described above, and I do get their buy-in for the big idea of a campaign. In my current game, the characters were strangers to the world, and so presenting them a land that they did not know and had to figure out was part of the appeal. Having them design an NPC would've been at cross-purposes with that appeal. In more open-ended games, I like to have the PC's tell me what they're interested in at character creation, and then build the slice of the world they'll see through the lens of their characters. Like, a PC choosing the Criminal background might mean there's a criminal organization that'll be prominent in the game, and a PC choosing the Shadow Sorcerer subclass probably means I'll be referencing the Shadowfell at some point, and a PC choosing to be a dragonborn probably means there will be dragons, and if that is all in the same PC, maybe I have a shadow dragon who sits at the core of a network of thieves as one of the villains of the game. I don't personally find that the edition matters that much for me - this is how I approached AD&D and how I approach 5e. When I ran 4e, I found a few elements worked against this style, but not enough to invalidate it. Like, the formalism of the skill challenge was never anything I adopted, and I didn't really miss it, and I don't think I had fewer moments of improvised skill checks because of that. Folks still told me what their characters did and I gave them a skill to roll.</blockquote>

Verification