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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5583812" data-attributes="member: 42582">JamesonCourage, thanks for the long reply.Some thoughts in response (and if Hussar's paying attention, sorry, more TL;DR):I never said they were. But I did say that ingame consequences that shut down play - when the player is still wanting to play, and is still a member in good standing of the play group - are undesirable. Pointless death is a major candidate here, although not the only one.One of my favourite ever PCs in a game I GMed was Xialath, a wizard in a Rolemaster game set in Greyhawk. Born into slavery in Rel Astra, he had (as part of his backstory) been trained as a criminal enforcer before buying his freedom and becoming a successful lawyer. When he actually entered the game as a PC, his story quickly turned into one of decline and near-fall - he became addicted to a trance-inducing drug (in an effort to improve the rate at which he regained spell points), lost his house as he couldn't afford payments on his lease, had a number of near-death or death-but-raised experiences as he was (i) pushed off a floating disc by a demon when the party demon summoner lost control, (ii) knocked off a levitating skiff to fall down the side of the Crystalmist Mountains when hit by a stone from a mountain giant, and (iii) eventually went into a cataonic state from drug withdrawal when he ran out of money. He was temporarily redeemed when a valley elf wizard rescued him from catatonia, joined him in Rel Astra and reintroduced him to the joys of life - but this came to an end when she, shapechanged into a songbird, was cut in half by another out-of-control demon! It was at this point that his companion decided to change sides, from Rel Astra to Vecna (as I was talking about somewhere upthread) - and having nothing left to live for, Xialath agreed to change sides also in return for having his house returned to him and being granted a magistracy. (He then went on to find new meaning in campaigning for an end to discrimination in the wizards' league, and to slavery in the new Great Kingdom.)I think some of the choices and turning points I've described here were hard ones. And some of the consequences were, I think, negative for the PC. But none of them brought play to an end, or removed from the player the capacity to use his PC as a vehicle for engaging the gameworld and making the points that he wanted to make.Interestingly, it seems the opposite to you - I react to the decisions that the players make, in order to keep pushing them to new decision points and new choices. Whereas decisions that the GM makes purely on the basis of his/her own judgment of what is "reasonable" within the gameworld seem to me to be more guiding of the players - it seems to me that, on that approach, the GM is primarily responsible for what happens in the gameworld.I'm not that interested in just "playing a character" - I see the character as a means to an end. (One shots or conventions are a bit different, although even then I find that the character tends to come alive, for me, because of the relationships and backstory in which s/he is embedded.) My PC is my vehicle for doing stuff. And when I've been pursuing that end for 9 levels, doing a whole lot of stuff, only to have all that effort undone by the GM, my interest in starting from scratch is pretty slight.And that past play has been rendered meaningless - not in the sense that it didn't happen (it did, and it was good while it lasted), but in the sense that I had gradually built up a whole set of undestandings and expectations and ingame realities about my PC, which I could then use to do the stuff I wanted to do. And then the GM vacated it all. (The fact that ingame changes achieved by my PC might endure into the future isn't really all that relevant to me here - the point of my play wasn't to get the GM to edit some detail of his gameworld notes, but to build up my PCs relationship and situation in the gameworld so I could do stuff with it, in play.)My player isn't defined in the way you describe - but my interest and investment in the game is defined by the way I can use my PC to do stuff, which is typically going to be expressed by building up certain relationships in the setting and acting on them.As a GM, I expect to have principal responsibility for the bacstory, although the players have a role too - particularly when their PCs are concerned - but once the game is in motion, the setting is a joint possession. If the players have their PCs do stuff, not only is it done at the ingame level (ie is there some ingame consequence) but it is done at the metagame level too - I as GM shouldn't negate it or undo it by (eg) teleporting all the PCs to some other time or place where what they've done is of no consequence to the situation in which they now find themselves.Sure. For me, this means that I do my best to introduce consequences that don't negate or undo what the players have chosen. Sometimes this requires a judgment call. I posted an example of this upthread in my discussion of the dwarf PC in my group - if I were to suddenly introduce a new, serious element to his so far somewhat comic dealings with the NPC dwarves (eg it turns out that one of his tormentors, on whom he's now had his revenge, was responsible in the past for saving the PC's family from death) would I be adding a complication that drives things forward? Or would I be undoing what the player has done, in part by introducing seriousness where he had (not unreasonably) though that there was only comedy, and therefore retrospectively making his PC look pretty bad in a way that the player coulnd't reasonably have been expected to anticipate? I think maybe the latter, which is why I'm approaching it very cautiously.But to me, this reflection reinforces the way in which decisions about setting, and campaign backstory, and consequences, can very much have the effect (inadventently at least in my case, given that I'm trying to avoid it) of shutting down or invalidating certain sorts of player choices. Which is why I used the word "railroading" way upthread.</blockquote>

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