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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8602603" data-attributes="member: 42582">Consider <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">the following</a> from Paul Czege, which has been quite influential on my GMing:More often than not, the PC's have been geographically separate from each other in the game world. So I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out. I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. We've had a group character session, during which it was my job to find out what the player finds interesting about the character. And I know what I find interesting. I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.The "unfixedness" of NPC personalities is a useful GMing technique. That is an instance of the sort of "fluidity" that [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has described, I think, though on the GM rather than player side.But the fluidity is not a component or feature of the fictional position. Rather, it means that there is no fictional position in which these NPCs' personalities figures. Only once the personality becomes fixed, does it become a part of the shared fiction.This contrasts with a change in fictional position that reflects changes in the fiction - eg at the start, Harguld's crossbow is loaded, but at the end it's not because he's shot at the Gnoll.We see similar fluidity (not change) in relation to when Harguld shoots. Only after Dro has delared the shot, and only after he has then triggered Cunning, do we learn that Harguld waited and that the Gnoll was thus too close.</blockquote>

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