Maybe at your tables. Not at mine. Players frequently wanted to do things beyond the next railroad or linear adventure. Forge weapons of power, raise armies, build castles, etc. That’s all player defined quests. And the notion that players couldn’t do that before it was codified in 4E is ridiculous.
Nobody is saying that. What we're saying is that D&D, until 4e talked about quests, never ever provided even the slightest support or help with that. I mean, it WAS acknowledged as a thing that happens, but GMs were simply left totally to their own devices on questions about how, when, why, etc. Beyond that, sometimes D&D actually took a stance AGAINST it. 2e is infamous for this! "Oh, you want to make a magic item!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, go harvest the dying breath of a star, sucker. Oh, and what does that mean? Good luck figuring that out!" I mean, you COULD interpret it to mean "give interesting plot hooks" but the whole thing was almost universally interpreted by GMs to mean "make it so hard that the players will be discouraged from doing this, because you know those sneaky players are just trying to get some vorpal weapons!"
The word expect is throwing your argument off. Even in the much over-hyped 4E version of player-authored quests, the DM is still the final arbiter. The player cannot expect anything. They can make a request. That is all. And that’s assuming the DM tells the player that’s a thing. Again, the line is tucked away in the DMG…not the PHB.
No, it is in both books, go back and read the post again! Nor is it really all that much under GM power. 4e states REPEATEDLY that a principle of the game is that the GM needs to 'say yes'. Sure, if you get some bad behavior kind of play where the player decides that building a nuclear device is a great quest, well that isn't going to fly, is it? AFAICT the GM's 'authority' is pretty much limited to that sort of consideration. Issues obviously come up in terms of who gets spotlight time, did the other player's agendas get addressed too, is it practical to go in this direction. Those are things that hardly need to be noted, tables have to decide on that sort of thing and it certainly limits any given player in ALL types of game.
Not really, no. The setup to a story is not itself a story. There’s a room full of orcs…isn’t a story. It’s a situation. Only when the characters interact with it does a story happen.
No, you don’t. The plot is the sequence of actions or events that happens over the course of the story. The characters haven’t interacted with the setting…so there’s no actions, no plot, no story...until they interact with it.
Yes, setting, character, and plot make up a story. The characters are the PCs in this case. The setting is the setting of the game. The plot is the hows and whys of the characters interacting with the setting. So until they do interact…there’s no action or events…no plot…no story. There’s backstory. There’s history. But there’s no story of the characters exploring this setting. Not yet.
Yes, you have the potential energy to tell a story. It’s only through play that you turn the potential energy into kinetic energy. Through play you turn the situation into a story.
Plot is what the characters do as they interact with the setting. The players literally define the plot by making declarations of what their characters do. Is this a heist plot a romance plot or a comedy plot? I don’t know until the players start having their characters do things.
My sandboxes are completely constructible and destructible. The players and their characters are free and welcome to define, transform, reshape, and redefine the setting however they wish through their characters’ actions.
Right, but I think what
@Hussar is trying to convey is that the TOPIC, the possible range of outcomes and what elements are going to be present in any story is already entirely defined by what the GM put into the sandbox. Yes, the actual outcomes of what happened when the PCs went to the orc lair is undefined, but that is going to be decided by dice and player expertise. Sure, it can go a couple ways, but its a story about fighting orcs. At best the players can go east instead of west and fight bugbears. Heck, they are unlikely to even know which direction leads to which outcome!
LOL. You mean beyond a half-dozen books filled with races, classes, subclasses, feats, and spells to choose from. I think you’re reacting to something other than me here.
And I think that D&D progressed a lot from 1e -> 2e -> 3.x -> 4e in terms of that being applicable to the story in a direct way. With 4e it kind of reached a pinnacle. Everything had keywords, it was very easy to combine character elements from any source through a uniform power system, a very solid system of character advancement that was heavily invested in the story of the character (theme, Paragon Path, Epic Destiny, plus heavy feat-based customization). 5e sadly backed off on 4e's explicit description of all of this as story and setting input (although I do think 5e fixed some issues with how 4e's material was structured and presented).
Lots of words used in this thread are wildly divergent from any recognizable common definition. See: jargon.
I don't think there are 'recognizable common definitions' for most of this, frankly. I think there was a lot of people talking past each other, and then someone said "here's how I am defining things so you understand me." Nobody is being obfuscatory, if we simply use undefined words and hope that everyone understands, it fails to happen. D&D has terminology, hit point, monster, PC, DM, save, attack roll, armor class, etc. Without those commonly understood definitions it would be unplayable. Just ask some newbie that comes to a table and can't make heads or tails of what's going on for the first 2 weeks.
Note how you would refer to a story that’s not over. It’s incomplete, in progress, unfinished, etc. Without these modifiers a story is something that’s happened. It’s been told. Past tense. Finished.
Well, the story STARTS to be told, IMHO, when someone sits down and says "OK, there's a wilderness here, and a town there, and an orc lair in a hill over here..." No, it isn't finished until its played out, but it didn't START at the instant the players were told "OK, you're all in the tavern..."
According to you. But you’re wrong. That’s not happening. I do not control the player characters, the players do. I do not control the plot, which is the sequence of actions and events that are the interaction of the PCs and the setting. I control only the setting.
That's not ENTIRELY true. If you tell me my character is in an east/west passage, I may have a choice, but A) is it meaningful? (only if you tell me what the significance of the directions is) and B) its only a very limited choice, what the plot is ABOUT was defined by the GM, entirely. Now, in certain situations you may take player input into things, like they suggest they want to make an item and you figure out what the outcome of that is.
