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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8438105" data-attributes="member: 42582">It seems to me that there are multiple things going on here that could cause problems.First, the GM is using pre-authored notes as an important component of action resolution - eg the presence of the sister in the AoE of the fireball - but does not want that prep to be binding.Second, the GM is bringing high-stakes material into play - again, the presence of the sister in the scene - but is not revealing those stakes to the players - who therefore risk killing the sister without knowing it.Third, the player is performing action declarations, like fireballing in the general vicinity of where they expect the sister to be, and wants a guaranteed outcome of a reunion with the sister.No wonder it's a fiasco!There are really straightforward GMing techniques that can avoid (1) and (2), and also encourage players to reduce the sort of hold that is found in (3). One is to prioritise situation over backstory. Another is to use the AW framework of soft moves before hard ones. In this example, a soft move could be anything from a sign or clue that the sister has joined the cult, to actually catching a glimpse of her face beneath the cowl of her hood. Then the players would know what is at stake when the cult discovers them.If the sorcerer nevertheless proceeds to fireball, the risk to the sister is on that participant, not the GM.The whole notion of the Macguffin makes me wary. Why are the PCs hunting for this thing that is nothing but a plot device?I know D&D modules are full of this stuff. It is a marker of very strong GM control of the fiction: what the situations will be; what the stakes will be; what the protagonist goals will be; and often, as in this immediate discussion, what the outcomes will be.Perhaps. I don't think I've expressed an opinion, have I, on whether your or [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER]'s RPGing is "story before" or "story after".That said, I think a hexcrawl is more likely to produce "story after" than a sandbox where the PCs encounter "quest givers" like the faction who will provide the information if the PCs raid the outpost. To me that has quite a hint of "story before". Likewise in some of FrogReaver's hypotheticals about how various sorts of action declarations might lead to encounters with Orcs or similar enemies. That also has quite a hint of "story before".As I've said, I think it depends on the details of the sandbox. A sandbox in which players move their PCs among plots and factions with the expectation of play being that the PCs will get caught up in these seems to me to have a hint of "story before". It would be "story after" in [USER=7030755]@Malmuria[/USER]'s example of the PCs sitting in a tavern while the GM narrates all the action of the NPCs around them.This is <a href="http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf" target="_blank">Edwards on "story after"</a>:between sessions or at the start of a new one, the players learn how what happened last time generated plot events, which are now the context for whatever actions they might take this time. The point is that play itself doesn’t make a story “on the ground,” but provides raw material for selective interpretation and use by one person afterward, the results of which are then folded into the next round of play. . . . in playing this way, appreciation of the setting may well be a front-and-center, experiential aspect. I haven’t been sympathetic to the idea but it may have quite functional applications given that priority.I think at least some metaplot heavy FR-ish or Planescape RPGing must look like this.If the factions etc are  situation but not quest-givers, then maybe we have neither "story before" nor "story after" but "story now". The reason I've been assuming we don't is because [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] and [USER=7030755]@Malmuria[/USER] seem to be contrasting their RPGing with story now, rather than presenting it as an instance of it. My view on this is very much what I posted in the earlier thread:If I'm GMing Burning Wheel, then your suggested best practices make sense. If I'm GMing Moldvay Basic, then I don't think they're best practices at all.</blockquote>

Verification