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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5298849" data-attributes="member: 22779">Interesting stuff all around.There are strengths and weaknesses of both approaches really.  The wide open, "You're at the gates of Paris, what do you do?" is great in that it allows the player to engage with the setting.  It's bad in that it presumes a fair degree of setting knowledge that the player may not possess.  For myself, presented with that scenario, with my pretty much complete lack of knowledge of Paris of that time period, I'd be pretty lost.  "Umm, find a bar?"  <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=":)" /> would be my most likely response.OTOH, if you start off with a tighter woven group, with interconnections and whatnot, I believe it is true that you can get into the meat of things much faster.  But, there's a problem that the player might create a character and then find that that character isn't what he wants to play.  I know that happens to me from time to time.  A concept that seems really cool at the start turns out to be a complete dud at the table.So, now, I have to eject that character and bring in a new character, again repeating all the work of building in relationships and reasons for being with the group.  That can be very off putting and can really hurt the flow of the game.It's best if the GM is cognizant of the strengths and weaknesses of whichever method is chosen and then use the approach that will work best for the particular campaign.  I don't think that doggedly using the same approach for all campaigns is a good idea.  Use the tools that work best, rather than driving screws with hammers.</blockquote>

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