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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8627075" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Perfectly fine (not that you need me to tell you that). As noted, some folks find the sweetest thing in RPG life to be Story After, where their characters aren't anybody until well after they've done something, and a story can be told about how they did something. You see some shades of this concept in the wrap-up for the game King of Dragon Pass, if you manage to fully complete the "golden" ending and unite your people with the "Grazers." That is, throughout the game, you're basically just trying to keep your clan powerful, and then you stumble upon prophecy stuff that says some ambiguous stuff, leading to scripted events (aka Story Before, which is a given because it's a video game), where your clan leader has to stay alive long enough and perform various tasks correctly. In the aftermath, a female chief marries the Luminous Stallion King (while a male chief marries the Feathered Horse Queen), the wedding is officiated by a friggin' dragon, and you and your spouse found a glorious new dynasty that will lead your combined peoples for generations to come....until eventually, your own life will become a Heroquest for others to follow! It isn't much, since as stated it's a video game and thus 99% of its content is inherently Story Before, but these little touches give a touch of Story After. And for some folks that's rad as hell.Likewise, lots of people really aren't interested in Story Now, and much prefer Story Before. They want things to make sense, to "flow." As noted in that quoted section from the 3.5e DMG2, many people see it as being "a night at the movies," or to use a phrase I've seen in various places (though, notably, for both Story Before and Story Now), it's like "characters in your favorite TV show," except if you're the DM you're the one setting the stage for the actors to act on (Story Now)/writing the over-arching plotline while the characters play out their own personal arcs (Story Before).What does "provide material" mean? To me, material is only useful once it has been built into something. Would you agree? If so, then that is why I see that as so clearly "Story Before." The DM is the one actually building those material components into some kind of plot. E.g., since I know that my party Bard has both parents alive and two living brothers, treating that as material means me thinking, "What plots could I weave that would endanger these family members, or alternatively, endanger their relationship to the Bard?" That's fundamentally Story Before thinking.Instead, in actual Story Now play, yes, those are relevant facts, but I don't treat them as material from which to build something. Instead, the player might have said (though he didn't), "I've always gotten along better with my mom and struggled with my dad, who has been distant and forbidding, favoring my elder brother the Temple Knight and my younger brother, the one being groomed to take over the family textile business. I want to explore that conflict--my rivalries with my siblings and my fraught relationship with my father." That is then a signal to me that I need to frame scenes such that (a) these relatives or things related to them will show up, so that there can be conflict of some kind that actually involves them, and (b) the kinds of conflicts involved generally don't need to be violent ones, but instead ones of personal perception (oh, how many siblings mutually feel the other has been treated better!), resources, prestige, poor communication, etc. Thus, my scene-framing might include setting a scene where the Bard is liable (but not guaranteed) to misunderstand a situation, or to catch someone in a compromising position, or to risk his own or the family's reputation, etc.--not because I have any plot in mind for such conflicts, but because the player thinks it will be interesting to face and resolve such conflicts.Likewise, my issues with the other bits. "Take your game in...new directions" implies you have directions you were going, which means a pre-written plot. You can't go in a new direction if you didn't have an old direction to go, y'know? And similarly "force you to improvise," well, a lot of the heavy lifting is that word "force." If you are forced to improvise, that means you otherwise would have not done so, but something made it so you had to. All of this communicates pretty strongly that the DM already has a firm direction, is the "author" of the situation, and the players are causing complications which have to be adjusted for. Story Now isn't supposed to have any pre-planned direction for there to be adjusted.I mean, I think it does do so, but it's worth noting that 2006 is well after the GNS model had been promulgated. Indeed, it's nearly a decade after the original "threefold model" was proposed, and around seven years after the more fully-articulated statements (which came around '99). So I would absolutely expect that people would have been accounting for this if Edwards and the Forge generally had been saying "hey, this is a thing people want, but which isn't getting served" 7-9 years earlier.But--and I think you have essentially admitted this already, please correct me if I'm wrong--the framing of the text (especially the opening bit that I elided) pretty clearly presents this as mostly a minority of players. It strongly implies that a good chunk of players really couldn't care less about story (these are, presumably, hardcore gamists, what I would call "Score-and-Achievement" players), and that even among those who do care, relatively basic story-work is all you need to do to satisfy them.Okay but...it does. I mean, it doesn't spell it out as fully and explicitly as it does in the 4e DMG, but it literally does say that player-written quests are a thing. It even explicitly says to check out the DMG if you want to know what the guildelines are! 4e PHB page 258, "Quests":</blockquote>

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