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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5587357" data-attributes="member: 42582">RC, I don't know where your notion of "mitigation against consequences" is coming from, or what you take it to encompass. Can you give an example from actual play - whether your own experience, or one of the actual play examples I mentioned upthread?It seems to me that the random table doesn't determine how the thematic material is addressed - it seems to me to determine whether or not it is addressed.Example: In an episode involving escape from a goblin fortress, the PCs in my game encounterd a slave held by the goblins. It was the mother of one of the PCs, who was himself a refugee from a sacked city who believed all his immediate family to be dead.  As I understand The Shaman's approach, whether or not any given slave is a parent of a PC would be determined via the table. In my approach, it is determined by my deliberate choice as a GM - and what motivates that choice is that it will push the player to engage with the gameworld along the sorts of thematic lines that the player has indicated to me via his PC's backstory and his prior play of his PC.Example: As I've mentioned a couple of times now, it will make a big difference to the thematic significance of the dwarf PC in my game having led one of his former-tormentors- turned-followers into a confrontation with a behemoth which resulted in that NPC being squashed, whether or not that squashed former tormentor, while a dwarven soldier in good standing, saved the life of one of the PC's family members. As I understand The Shaman's approach, whether or not any given dwarven soldier was responsible for such a feat would be determined via the table. In my approach, it will again be determined by my deliberate choice as a GM. What pushes in favour of going that way is that would increase the pressure on the player (via the honour of his PC, who is after all a Warpriest of Moradin) quite a bit. What pushes against it is that it would escalate an episode which the player had approached in a light-hearted and humorous fashion into something much more serious, thus potentially punishing the player for not anticipating the change of tone (and therefore not having his PC do more to keep the NPC from being squashed).A random table will not help with this. I don't need a prompt to my creativity. I already know what the relevant game elements (actual and potential) are. What I have to decide is what exactly should be done with them in order to frame a suitable situation for that player to enage with (via the medium of his dwarf PC). Another way of putting it would be this: I am wondering what the consequences should be for the dwarf PC who let his former-tormentors-now-followers be squashed by a behemoth. Should those consequences include having permitted the death of someone to whom he owed a deep debt of familial gratitude (although he did not know of that debt at the time)?This is about consequences, but the notion of mitigation plays no role that I can see. I hadn't even thought of the possibility of such a consequence until I started discussing the episode with Hussar upthread.Nor does the notion of "naturalness" play much of a role. It is neither natural nor unnatural that one of the squashed dwarf NPCs should also be a former saviour of the PC's family.What is guiding my decision about this issue are the competing metagame considerations I've stated above (pushing the player vs invalidating/"gotcha-ing" the players' prior engagement with the situation). This is certainly not simulationist play - I'm not simulating anything (a world, a genre, a causal process). If you're saying that you GM your game in this fashion, then you're fessing up to narrativism.But I'm pretty sure that that's not what you're saying, and that you don't GM a narrativist game. It certainly wouldn't fit with the general trend of your posting history.The main thing that is puzzling me about this conversation, therefore, is your apparent reluctance to distinguish your approach from my (i) to (iii) upthread. I am assuming that you think something is at stake here - that (i) to (iii) capture something that you think is important to play, even though - earlier in this very thread, if I recall correctly - you seemed to be insisting that your approach to GMing is very different from mine (to the extent of suggesting that I don't understand classic D&D play).I guess it would help me if you said something about how you see your (simulationist? or Gygaxian-style gamist with a very heavy simulationist substrate?) play as incorporating/reflecting (i) to (iii) above.</blockquote>

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