NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8623696" data-attributes="member: 6790260">From the recent statements made, it would seem my values are "low competition gamism" (at both the "step on up" level and the "challenge" level; I consider it pretty rude to "compete" for the best magic items, as an example), some amount of "high concept simulation" (because I kinda do see D&D as a fantasy action hero movie where the players are the main cast), and (inventing my own terms) "what kind of hero are you? How will the world note your passing?" narrative.This last bit is part of why I would consider it an abject failure if my players felt they were merely going through the motions in a fantasy novel I had already written. There would be no answer to those questions, other than one I had stuffed into their mouths. I would consider myself unfit to DM. That's how serious I feel answering those questions is. I play a role in setting up some of the opposition and information that exists, but so do the players. I have told them in advance that there are certain answers to those questions that would push things outside my comfort zone—namely, "I am not a hero at all, but a villain" and "the world will respond with fear and loathing at the evil I have wrought"—but otherwise I want them to answer those questions without me interfering. At absolute most, my role is to surprise the players with versions or aspects of questions like those, that they had never previously considered. Questions like how one deals with religion, with politics. "Moral" challenges like deeply-held convictions suddenly opposed by emotional intuitions, or unquestioned self-conceptions suddenly faced with revealed (or overlooked) contradictory evidence. Because those challenges, those questions, force the player to do something that cannot, even in principle, be done by looking over a character sheet or invoking a clever mechanical contrivance. They force the player to decide what their character truly cares about, where their values lie, what is in fact true about them whether or not they knew it before that moment.This is why I say I value both gamism and narrative, but (generally) on different layers or aspects of the experience. I love teamwork strategy, a group coming together to be more than the sum of its parts in order to overcome a challenge that would have been impossible without teamwork, and to then share the spoils in an equitable and group-oriented way (e.g. "oh, I just got a new sword, so you can have these new boots if you want 'em.") This sort of fills the midpoint of play enjoyment: moments of spice and excitement at loosely regular intervals, as opposed to the bedrock steady stream of enjoyment from just pretending to be a consistent other person besides myself.I also love being put in, or putting my players in, situations where the player must make a decision about what matters to them, where the player has to pause for a moment and genuinely ask, "Who am I?" "What do I want?" "Who do I serve, and who do I trust?" (Anyone who gets this reference wins one internet.) It's legitimately thrilling to see someone come to a startling realization about their world and thus choose to change who they are, or galvanize their commitment to a cause, or discover that they have come to trust someone they once hated, or be caught by surprise at their own righteous indignation at a foe, or that they truly MUST do something even if they find it deeply disquieting because their moral self-appraisal will not let them choose otherwise. (All of these have happened in my game, and have been epic moments, ones that I hope my players will cherish long after the campaign comes to an end.)On the road to getting these things—the steady stream of RP, the tension and release of combat challenge, and the poignant or thrilling moments of introspection and moral quandary—it is super damn cool if you can make sure the world is maximally self-consistent and well-grounded in its rules and processes. It's not necessary, but getting to that point is really nice polish when you can pull it off.</blockquote>

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