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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5307866" data-attributes="member: 42582">"Yes" to the first question, and -as you say - "both" to the second.Chargen choices are going to have a big influence on the initial encounters, but as the game unfolds the subsequent choices that the players make become more significant.Right. In my current game, one of the PCs is a drow sorcerer demonskin adept who is part of a drow secret society that serves Corellon and wants to overthrow Lolth in order ultimately to reunite the sundered branches of elvenkind. Around the campfire he sings songs in elven remembering the times the elves were all one under the stars and by the shores of the Feywild.Some of this was built into the PC at character generation. Other details, including the existence of the secret society and its relationship to surface elves, have been built up over the course of play.Now late epic tier is a long way off, so it is by no means guaranteed that a confrontation with Lolth is coming. But just from what I've said it's pretty obvious that it's a possibility. If the player instead decides to try and avoid Lolth, or to appease her, that would be a pretty big change in direction which has nothing to do with "skillful play" and everything to do with where the player wants the story, and his PC, to go. And if combat with Lolth does come, for the reasons I said in my response upthread to Raven Crowking, I think that SSSoD, poison that causes ongoing damage, etc will play out better than SoD.I haven't run or played in a game like this for over 20 years. Even where individual PCs have been little more than mercenaries, they've been embedded in parties where enough of the party is motivated by some ingame loyalty or similar concern (like your Dragonlance example) that the pure mercenary style of play has not been there. There have been occasions where PCs and parties who have higher loyalties have found themselves, by dint of circumstances, reduced to mercenary-type work (generally tomb robbing) but this has always had an element of self-consciousness about it, and sometimes even has led to a "What have I become?" moment as part of the game.That's not to say that my players don't like items and level up, or that there is no gamist tendency in the games that I run. But there is a game/metagame divide at work. The gamism doesn't filter down to be the principal motivation for the PCs.This reminds me of a discussion in the other long thread!I agree with Doug that an exploration game can turn into a more encounter/theme/PCs-emotionally-embedded-in-gameworld driven game over time. I've run games that are a bit like this. And I'm still a big fan of "developed in play". It's just that these days - since I learned that it can be done, and that "metagaming" is not a synonym for "cheating" - I like "developed at start" too, so that the play that I enjoy gets going even earlier.It's goes without saying that others - like The Shaman - might legitimately prefer a different approach to play. But I will rise to the bait and say that, while I think I'll concede the "organic" point, I don't think I'll concede the "real" point. Because a players playing out of a relationship or some history that was developed at start, when done well, can make it as real as if it emerged purely organically out of nothing but the course of play.</blockquote>

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