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="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8626518" data-attributes="member: 86653">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. 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. 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. 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. Lots of words used in this thread are wildly divergent from any recognizable common definition. See: jargon.  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. 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.</blockquote>

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