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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6590172" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is no such ingame history. Or at least, no such history known to me or the players.The reason the players focus on undead and demon-killing ability is because, having played with me for over 15 years in a group that has had overlapping membership going back 25 years, I am known as a GM to favour those sorts of creatures as opponents for the PCs.Which module? I didn't know we were talking about a module. I've been talking about a hypothetical that originated with you and [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION], where there is a choice of left and right paths, the right path is known to lead to the possibility of victory, and the left path is essentially unknown, and unknowable except by taking it.Yep. At this level of description, the game may or may not be player-driven: see below.And for me, this is the crux. If you look at D&D adventures from the 70s (and even early 80s) - say, the modules published by TSR, or the adventures in White Dwarf - what you see is that the office will be there, but it will provide some reasonable avenue for PC (and therefore player) exploitation.The particular issue we were talking about was time, and these adventures from the first decade of the game generally don't have time-driven scenarios of the "rescue the prisoners" variety. The main reason for caring about time, as a player, is because it determines the incidence of wandering monster rolls. It also determines the use of torches, the consumption of rations, the expiration of spell durations, etc.So in these games, the GM puts in the office for a veneer of verisimilitude, but it is also a potential resource for players to exploit. In this era, it would be considered a bad example of dungeon design to put in a choice which (i) cannot be scoped out in advance of being made, and (ii) is an autolose.I don't know how the video games you mention are designed, so I don't know if they follow this model or not. Generally, the Fighting Fantasy books that I used to play in the 80s adhered to it.For those current players who aren't familiar with these old adventures, they may be hard to conceive. As I mentioned upthread, I'm rereading the Puffin book "What is Dungeons & Dragons" (published 1982). It has a sample adventure, a dungeon with 20-odd rooms. The dungeon is an evil crypt.The high priest of the crypt is Odric. As the dungeon is written up, he is in the process of sacrificing a halfling NPC to a giant lizard in the main sacrifice hall (in the language of the time, this is a "freeze-frame" room - whenever the PCs arrive, the sacrifice is about to take place). This sacrifice hall is basically the centre of the dungeon, and the closest you get to a dramatic set-piece in this early style of D&D.In a room at the edge of the dungeon is a magical statue that can answer questions.And in a room between the dungeon entrance and the sacrifice hall is an office. And in the office is an NPC, a senior cleric of the cult from another town, who has come to investigate the theft from that town, by Odric, of the magical statue. There is no explanation of how this NPC entered the crypt without being seen by the orc guards at the entrance. There is no explanation of the fact that Odric seems completely oblivious to the presence of this angry NPC in his office, about 20 feet away from the main sacrifice hall where a sacrifice is about to take place.By contemporary standards this would be terrible adventure design, with no verisimilitude at all. But by the standards of the time it is quite sophisticated: the adventure designers have come up with a way of giving the PCs access to a friendly insider within the evil cult, with whom they can do a deal to find the stolen statue, get leverage against Odric, etc. The NPC in the office, like the magical statue, is first-and-foremost a gamepiece along these lines, and the function of the backstory is to give it all just enough verisimilitude to be tolerable in play, and to set up the fictional connections that will facilitate gameplay that trades on them.Once you get to modern world and adventure design, with contemporary standards of verisimilitude, coherent backstory, etc, it seems to me there are two ways of going. Roughly speaking, yours is one: the GM authors and has unilateral control over this word, which is not designed primarily as a gamepiece, and the consequence is that there is no player agency (at least as I am focusing on it).Mine is the other: the rules and procedures of the game preserve and foster player agency of the sort that I am interested in, and as a consequence the world gets filled out over the course of, and partly as a product of, play. This preserves the early convention that there will be no autolose options, but it abandons the early convention of a Spartan, paper-thin world written up in the GM's dungeon key.This was a good post on the Spartan world!My point of disagreement is in respect of the last sentence: I think the difference between the two approaches is not slight, at least in extended campaign play. Because in extended campaign play the effects of decisions compound and snowball - so in a GM/system-driven approach, the game ends up being the players exploring the GM's world/story; whereas in the player-driven approach, the game ends up being some sort of expression of the players' conceptions of their characters and those PCs' goals.</blockquote>

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