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<blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 49015" data-attributes="member: 172"><p>I think the dichotomy is somewhat artificial. Yeah, I agree you shouldn't railroad. But by the same token, you can't rely on the players to be self motivating and sometimes, building up a situation can be very dramatic.</p><p></p><p>What I do is decide what is happening in my world, and decide what interesting stuff results that the players get caught up in, in essence making a story arc based on the circumstances of the world. However, as I have said elsewhere, I don't make plots. I make situations. I do throw specific tangles at the players and expect them to get involved, but how it plays out is largely in their hands.</p><p></p><p>But this is not really contradictory with either stance. Occasioanlly players do something that nullify all my assumptions... but that's okay. That is what the game is all about. The players deserve to be rewarded for ingenuity and unconventional thinking.</p><p></p><p>For example, in one game, I hade a staff made of a cursed gold called "faegold" that could invoke cataclysms. Before its last user perished, he set into motion a cataclysm that would end the world if not stopped. The stop it, the staff must be destroyed. But it can only be destroyed by an artifact that can only be wielded by members of the true blood of the royal family. There are only two more members of this family, and one is not sympathetic to their cause -- he is a priest of an evil god who actually set this whole situation up as a massive sacrifice that will significantly help his status in the lower planes. So what the party had to (in theory) do was find his exiled sister and help her to destroy the staff, which was a campaign in and of itself.</p><p></p><p>It never happened. I had totally forgotten that the party had the means to gate things to another plane. The sent the staff to the plane of water, temporarily anulling the crisis.</p><p></p><p>This pretty much scrapped the tenative story arc I had in my head. But that's okay. The party's way of dealing with the problem with have some other consequences I can use in the future, and it spun the campaign off in a fresh direction. That is one major element that RPGs can give you that movies and novels can't.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Psion, post: 49015, member: 172"] I think the dichotomy is somewhat artificial. Yeah, I agree you shouldn't railroad. But by the same token, you can't rely on the players to be self motivating and sometimes, building up a situation can be very dramatic. What I do is decide what is happening in my world, and decide what interesting stuff results that the players get caught up in, in essence making a story arc based on the circumstances of the world. However, as I have said elsewhere, I don't make plots. I make situations. I do throw specific tangles at the players and expect them to get involved, but how it plays out is largely in their hands. But this is not really contradictory with either stance. Occasioanlly players do something that nullify all my assumptions... but that's okay. That is what the game is all about. The players deserve to be rewarded for ingenuity and unconventional thinking. For example, in one game, I hade a staff made of a cursed gold called "faegold" that could invoke cataclysms. Before its last user perished, he set into motion a cataclysm that would end the world if not stopped. The stop it, the staff must be destroyed. But it can only be destroyed by an artifact that can only be wielded by members of the true blood of the royal family. There are only two more members of this family, and one is not sympathetic to their cause -- he is a priest of an evil god who actually set this whole situation up as a massive sacrifice that will significantly help his status in the lower planes. So what the party had to (in theory) do was find his exiled sister and help her to destroy the staff, which was a campaign in and of itself. It never happened. I had totally forgotten that the party had the means to gate things to another plane. The sent the staff to the plane of water, temporarily anulling the crisis. This pretty much scrapped the tenative story arc I had in my head. But that's okay. The party's way of dealing with the problem with have some other consequences I can use in the future, and it spun the campaign off in a fresh direction. That is one major element that RPGs can give you that movies and novels can't. [/QUOTE]
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