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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5086320" data-attributes="member: 3820">Sure. I take your meaning. I would, but perhaps not in the way that you mean. If a player came to me with such a goal, I would devote more of my attention to making that goal something that was more personal. If someone were to create Jean-Louis from Scaramouche, for instance, I would probably create his rival the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr after he created his character (or work with the player to create him, though perhaps withholding certain key plot twists that occur to me) rather than selecting a potential rival from those that already exist, if that makes sense. Mmm. If a player is beaten or felled by a scheme they had some part in -- defeated by the six-fingered man he described as his father's murderer, or overwhelmed by the conspiracy that I'd expanded to fill a larger role when I saw the delighted glint in my players' eyes -- that's not illusory. The effects wind up being largely the same, I'm just cribbing from my players among other sources of inspiration.That said, I quite take your point. If discovering things that are set up with the intention that you're probably not going to discover them is a source of delight, yeah, we would have incompatible gaming styles. No, not quite. I don't play a "no surprises" game. Unexpected troubles and plotlines arise all the time, things the players don't choose. But I do keep tabs on what players are responding to with enthusiasm. If most of the group is actively disinterested in fighting against the forces of a given religion, then I don't push that conflict as something they absolutely must get involved with. The conflict doesn't magically vanish, but I make sure they have options to, say, get another faction of NPCs to handle the conflict so they don't have to worry about it. Essentially, I've been in the situation where I felt that in-character I was bound to pursue a Very Important Conflict, or bad things would happen, while as a player I had no real interest in that conflict or the antagonists that came with it. I would rather have been in another portion of the setting doing something else. I don't really want my players to feel that way. Wasn't much fun.As a caveat, though, I play all-but-exclusively with existing friends. So I already know much of what they like, and what they find interesting. Letting one plotline fade gracefully into the background because nobody like the sound of it is a largely theoretical practice, because the situations I tend to set up are ones that the players generally get quite enthusiastic about. Planting the seeds of the first session during character creation is indispensable, no argument here. So would you start that first session with the question of "Where are you, and what are you doing?", or are you more inclined to get them all in one place first and see what happens? For that matter, would you encourage players to pursue goals as a group, or would you expect the average session to have them scattered across the city for most of the evening?</blockquote>

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