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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8431468" data-attributes="member: 7030042">[USER=7032025]@Lyxen[/USER](If you're still bothering to read the thread.)As far as I am aware, outside of the most passive of sandboxes, it's fair to say that there are events in a game setting going on around the player characters. Some of those events might eventually impinge on the PCs' activities. Some of those impinging events might even relate to whatever the PCs are preoccupying themselves with. Some of those events, impinging or not, might be occurring in a more-or-less naturalistic or causal sequence. In a self-contained module, such events are almost certainly going to intersect with the PCs activities simply because of the scope of the module. (Particular ways of modeling this might be, say, Dungeon World's Fronts or the Threat Clocks [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] refers to.)Likewise, NPC factions and entities in the game world might react downstream to what the player characters have done, again in a more-or-less naturalistic or causal fashion. For instance, if the PCs are dungeoncrawling, whoop a bunch of monster rear end, and withdraw for the day, the remaining monsters might very well leave the dungeon with whatever they can carry. Or if the PCs derail the Cult of Doom's plans, the Cult of Doom does some divination work and sends assassins out after the PCs. Or if the PCs gain a reputation for slaying fearsome and dangerous monsters, they may have folk looking up to them as heroes and find it easier to bend the ears of the high and mighty.However, it does not follow from the fact that such events exist that there is then a plot, by which I mean a DM having a preconceived outcome of the interaction between the events of the game world and the PCs' actions, an outcome that the DM then attempts to enforce.Now, as it happens, a causal sequence of events is a plot in the most basic sense of the term. But I think the way I have defined the term is more useful with respect to the topic of this thread.Ideally, someone at the table (usually the DM for the most part in D&D, since this is a D&D thread) establishes a situation - at any scale, from the overall campaign to the specific circumstances of the module - in which the player characters find themselves and the plot that results, such as it is, is the emergent and unplanned, if not necessarily unpredictable, result of the player characters changing the game world as a result of their choices. That is, the in-fiction situation at the start of gameplay is a status quo that the PCs disrupt. And when you get right down to it, a linear adventure is an example of this kind of "status quo leads to PC-initiated disruption", where the PCs must successfully disrupt the status quo situation in the game world in order to advance to the next status quo that they must then also disrupt until completing the adventure. (*)Suffice to say I cannot agree with your apparent thesis that events which occur in the game but aren't the sole result of player action are of a piece with having a plot (in the sense I have used the term) or with railroading.[HR][/HR](*) In such adventures, the question at hand is not "what status quo will the PCs upend to fulfill their goals?" but closer to "will the PCs manage to upend this particular status quo?" What is more, such an adventure, ideally constituted, will allow the manner in which the PCs go about their business and many or most of the downstream consequences arise, emergent and unplanned, from the players' choices.</blockquote>

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