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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5087437" data-attributes="member: 80487">If it please you, a GM can be any thing you care to name, animal, vegetable or mineral. What goes on between consenting adults in the privacy of your game room is certainly no business of mine.It seems to me no radical innovation difficult to grasp that I reserve the right to expect a referee of a game in which I will play to act as just that, not as an 'editor', 'director', 'producer', 'completion insurance underwriter' or any other such job description that in fact does not appear in the rules-book.(I am not likely any time soon again to play either 4E or The Alan Smithee Project.)You were just uncertain in which book you read it, eh? Memory can get tricky with age!A convention game can be a fine change of pace, and for a number of reasons they tend to be pretty constrained. Setting up a scenario is hardly some hot new experimental technique, though! I have played my share in Squad Leader, and countless other games, without any imposition of 'story telling'.To go beyond the set-up, though, and 'play the game' for the players, is to me intolerable. I imagine you have heard of negative reactions to the presumption of the Dragonlance modules. Some years later, Vecna Lives! epitomized why I stopped buying from TSR.(From what I have heard, RPGA tournaments, then or a bit later, had basically devolved into "Most Popular Drama Queen" contests. Hearing of that is the closest I have come to encountering the extreme that some folks raise as necessitating the opposite extreme of replacing role-playing with roll-playing. Curiously, though, that was with "social skill" NWPs in play!)My main D&D group recently tried a 'storyline' setup for several sessions. I suppose we'll go back and wrap it up this month or next, but we put it on hiatus by consensus -- with the DM taking the lead in suggesting that.Besides not being what I want when I want a game of D&D, it highlighted how poorly suited many aspects of the old game are to a certain cramped sort of 'campaign'. A good selection of the "usual suspects" in complaints of alleged poor design came up, when the rules were put to this use for which they assuredly were not designed.(The DM's attempts to 'fix' some of those with house rules sometimes demonstrated the Law of Unintended Consequences, and in any case gave the enterprise only the less resemblance to Dungeons & Dragons as we had known it.)I have run some pretty tightly plotted affairs, 'railroads' par excellence, but (A) they were entirely games of my own design, not by any stretch D&D; and (B) they were single-session undertakings. One of them was rather risky, as if players had chosen to respond not merely with a different course of action but with a different perspective on -- a different interpretation of -- events, then the dramatic structure would have been seriously weakened.(I really, really do not like it when a GM expects people to "act as if" they are ignorant, surprised, or otherwise incapable of taking sensible courses of action. There is an extent to which I can accept strictures, certainly. Bans on outrageous anachronisms are pretty common. However integral that kind of acting, though, may be to a career on stage or screen, it is not the sort of challenge I want in a game! In that latter circumstance, I want to be challenged to use my intelligence and skill. If I am genuinely mystified or surprised, then that is a delight!)Juan Ponce de León was the very model of an 'adventurer' of the sort one might hope to emulate in old-style D&D. His own strong direction put him in a position in which his decisions might have a major impact on the world. (And he never found, and probably never really sought, the Fountain of Youth.)</blockquote>

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