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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6589891" data-attributes="member: 27160">I followed it just fine, I think, having come accross similar concepts connected with Hârn, and it actually helped crystallise the source of something that has long bothered me - but I'll return to that below as  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s post has a nice example to use.Hmm, I think I'm with  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], here - I don't think the choice the players make is meaningful. You might say it's picky; clearly, there are meaningful consequences in the resolution that follows the choice, but the players (and, we imagine, the characters) did not make any choice concerning the death of the sacrifices at all; I would say that their death was a result of happenstance, not deliberate player/character decision. That, to me, makes the decision itself meaningless - it was just part of a set of unlucky circumstances, nothing more.OK, we have danced with this scenario a little - meeting the "random" stranger, overhearing the interesting conversation, etc. This has been bothering me and I think it's because it sits at the heart of what I begin to see as a key problem with "naturalistic" play.The thing is, how many people do we encounter or conversations do we overhear from day to day? Speaking for myself, the answer is "loads". Most are inconsequential, a mere blip that barely registers on my memory "radar". Others are much more important. For some reason - often quite whimsical and sometimes totally unpredictable - they assume greater meaning than the myriad of others. But, how might we "model" this in a roleplaying game?One way might be to mechanically (or at least consciously) represent each individual instance, each with a "realistic" chance of being relevant/of interest or whatever. This seems to present to serious shortcomings: (i) the number of such interactions for even a small party of characters is likely to be prohibitive if we are to present a world that is not, as pemerton puts it, exceedingly "spartan", and (ii) what happens if, through simple whimsy, a player decides to take an active interest in one such instance? Do we need to prepare systems or scenarios for every such instance, just in case? That sounds impractical.One way around this might be to present only "representative" encounters, glossing over those we consider to be inconsequential. The problem here is that this removes some control of the character from the player, since it is the GM or the system, not the player, who is deciding what the character views as "interesting". Further, if the "representative" encounters are given only a "realistic" chance to be relevant to the current situation(s) of player interest, we will substantially underrepresent the number of such encounters (since it immediately implies that none of the encounters of which this is merely the representative example were of interest given the current situation if this representative one was not).Let's suppose, then, that we decide to play out only "representative" encounters in the characters' lives, and that we allow an enhanced chance that such encounters will relate directly to the matters of interest to the PCs (since they represent only one of many instances notionally going on, and to gloss over an instance of direct interest with a "nothing to see, here" would be at least as much a distortion of the naturalistic world as plot-directed scene framing would be). The problem, now, is "how do we decide what topic of interest to the PCs do we relate the encounter to?" - are we not right into just what you say you don't want? To mould the presentation of the game world based on what the players state as "of interest" for their character?In short, it seems to me that either we present a massive long list of random topics and ask the players for an indication of (lack of) interest in each one, or we cut out the tedious listing and just ask them - which you say you don't (want to) do.I think this explains why pretty much every RPG I have ever played ends up basically framing a situation (an "adventure") around whatever the players are either expecting to do or interested in doing. The first is basically the GM or the system telling the players "this is what you should expect to do" (which they can either accept or decline), the second is the players (maybe in negotiation and definitely with a GM veto) selecting what the game should be about. The difference between the two seems slight, to me.</blockquote>

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