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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6587833" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'll give an instance from actual play - the first session of Moldvay Basic that I GMed.(A long time ago. So only the barest outline is recalled.)A party of 12 or so characters was rolled up. They entered the dungeon I'd designed, which had a 5th level (or thereabouts - able to use the 3rd level spells mentioned in the rulebook) magic-user at the bottom of it. Some wandering monsters were encountered, a few rooms explored, the wizard confronted. In the end one of the characters - a halfling named Gloin Baggins - survived.There is a sequence of events there, but no story. Nothing of value to any of the characters was put under pressure except their survival. The treasure they hunted was of nothing but instrumental importance to them.That is not dramatically satisfying, though at the time it was a sufficient pleasing episode of play that we kept at it.For me, as a participant in episodes of RPGing (and as someone who chooses to spend my leisure time RPGing rather than doing other things with my friends), there is no comparison between that play experience and (say) the 20 seconds of tension when I waited to see whether the invoker/wizard would channel the souls to the Raven Queen or allow Vecna to take them: that was the culmination of foreshadowing by both me as GM (poking away with Vecna motifs, for so much of the campaign, including (just to give one memorable example) the PC suffering damage when he handled the Sword of Kas at low paragon, which the player correctly deduced was because the Sword could sense the PC's allegiance to Vecna) and by the player (implanting the Eye of Vecna into the imp), and came at the culmination of a quest that the PC Questing Knight had chosen for himself (to wreck the Soul Abattoir) - which added the frisson of potential intra-party conflict.I'm not saying that I could publish the second story and retire on the proceeds!, but I think it is in a completely different ballpark from the first adventure, and it was the adoption of certain GMing techniques that made it possible.In <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?736425-Burning-Wheel-First-Burning-Wheel-session" target="_blank">this Burning Wheel session</a>, why did I (as GM) decide that the NPC wizard live in a tower? Because one of the PCs had the instinct "Always cast Falconskin if I fall", and so I (as GM) wanted to put some of the action into a high place where a fall might take place!By giving that PC that instinct, the player had shown that the risk of falling was something that he wanted in the game.Generalising a bit, as GM I get to decide whether or not the gameworld contains towers, or passages that are vulnerable to collapse, etc. What should guide those decisions? In what I am calling a player-driven game, the choices made by the players, which signal what it is about their PCs that they want the game to force them to put on the line, provide the GM with guidance.I think by "drive the action" you mean "make action declarations for the PCs". It doesn't sound as if they have a big influence on determining the content of the shared fiction.For instance, if the GM decides who all the mysterious strangers are, where all the clues are and what they are clues to, what the treasure is and where/how it is hidden, without reference to player signals (whether implicit or explicit) then it seems to me that the shape of the action has been decided mainly by the GM.That could be a part of it, but isn't the core of what I'm talking about.Who gets to choose the nature of the "Big Bad"? In my reply to [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION], above this post, I gave two actual play examples about this. One illustrated GM-driven, the other player-driven.In a player-driven game of the sort I'm talking about, the players - through their choices in PC build, in backstory authorship, in the course of play - play the central role in deciding who is the Big Bad. Thus, in my 4e game, I'm not the one who decided that Torog, Orcus, Lolth and (ultimately) Vecna would be nemeses of the PCs. The players chose that.</blockquote>

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