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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5293172" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my view, there is a bit of tension between these two posts. The first suggests that, as a player, I should be thinking about the game from an in-character perspective. And this is reinforced by the comments in the second post about goals and relationships. But then the last bit, about "standing at the gates of Paris", assumes some sort of metagame thinking, or at least appears to. Because if I think about that situation from within the gameworld, then I have to realise that most fortune seekers will end up living lives that are boring, or miserable, or both. For a fortune-seeking game to work, I think there has to be some sort of understanding (be it explicit or implicity) between players and GM that the odds of having interesting stuff happen are greater, for a PC, than they are for a statistically average fortune-seeker.Once you let in that much of a metagame agenda, there seems to be no constraint but taste on how much more you admit. Including, perhaps, starting somewhere other than on a street corner.My preferences are closer to this than to The Shaman. Although my current D&D campaign did begin in a tavern, the PCs had already been designed with some links in mind, and with backgrounds/relationships that would predispose them to engaging with the gameworld. The tavern wasn't an alternative to metagaming, just a handy ingame location for the metagame to be implemented.I agree with this. If a good part of the pleasure in RPGing comes from seeing the players invest in the gameworld via the medium of their PCs, then it makes sense to design the PCs and/or the world to help ensure that investment from the get go, rather than make everyone faff around at the table to bring it about.And this is very easy to do in a bog-standard fantasy RPG. Clerics and paladins have their gods and temples. Fighters have their families and communities to who they have to prove themselves. Even rootless wanderers have their one-time home villages destroyed by marauding gnolls, upon whom they are now sworn to have their revenge.This is right, and it fits in with the use of "relationships" rather than "goals" as being helpful properties of a PC. Goals, on their own, don't necessarily invest a player in the game, because unless there is some sort of metagame understanding between GM and player, the player does not know how feasible it is to achieve his/her PC's goal (assuming it's not something completely mundane). It is goals that integrate into the existing gameworld elements - ie goals that are also relationships - that produce player investment. But to get this requires having players and GMs who are on the same page when it comes to world and PC design.I think Nameless1's suggestion is that this can all be done more quickly and less tediously at the metagame level, before play starts, so that once play begins there is no need to do all this stuff. Once play begins the players, the GM, the PCs and the gameworld can all already be on the same page.I think this is about the type of grief. The idea is not that the PCs should be driven into the ground, or that all the game elements that a player, via his/her PC, has become invested in should be destroyed. It's rather that the things that a player has become invested in should be the things that the game, as it is played, puts at stake.I don't agree with this. Exploration for its own sake is not of very much interest to me as a player - and as a GM, I try to consciously rein in my own tendency to overemphasis aspects of the gameworld that are of no interest beyond exploration for its own sake.In my experience, what adds depth to the gameworld for my players is when the gameworld returns upon their investment in it. So if they set out to defend their church against an evil cult, and start exploring the cult, and its demonic sponsors, and so on, the gameworld yields up answers to these investigations that the players can then respond to. The campaign I ran previous to my current one ran for 10 years, and I would guess that of the six players in that game only one or two would remember the map. But all remembered the relationship map that they drew up to keep track of their allies, their enemies, and the connections between all the other NPCs of the world.Agreed. I suspect that my game is not as focused on this as yours. It is still a D&D game, not an indie game, and so apart from anything else doesn't have quite the same mechanical techniques to force this as many indie games do. On the other hand, it is a 4e D&D game and so has more than zero techniques of this sort - paragon paths, epic destinies to come, and not to mention all the history and myth that the 4e D&D world is full of and in which players can very easily become caught up.Nicely put.</blockquote>

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