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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5088198" data-attributes="member: 3820">Thanks, Ariosto. It's appreciated. Sounds like a good deal. Thanks! I hope to be able to take you up on it before long.Sure! It's a good method. I just frequently find that I need to be a proactive nudger, for reasons that vary from group to group. If we play on a weeknight after work, people might not have the energy to come up with proactive agendas, and would rather react to external prompts. If we use bizarre homebrew settings (like my current Gormenghast/Labyrinth/Poe mashup), they frequently prefer that I introduce them to the setting with actively giving them things to react to. It lets them become familiar with the setting through play, without having to do quite much reading up beforehand to see what is likely to fit, and is a little less work than their defining the setting as they go. Actually, because I exclusively homebrew, I spend a lot of time working out the details of a setting as I go. I'm running the aforementioned strange baroque city game at the moment, as well as something set in a more Renaissance Italy-inspired fantasy country, and neither of them are settings I've exhaustively detailed ahead of time. So it's not time to figure out a city until the players absolutely are headed there — until then, I simply have a list of notes to work from. My players can guess (and my wife certainly knows) that I don't have everything pre-prepared, but it is all ready for them, if that makes sense. I think it wouldn't work for the experience you are interested in; there would be the meta-knowledge that the world is not already fully formed. If that meta-knowledge doesn't bother you, though (as it doesn't for my friends), then there's still the experience of having the world spread out before you in each direction you go, and if a few details are ad-libbed while others have been set for years, it doesn't detract too much from the overall fun of the game.It's something of a facetious example for me. I'm not fond of world-shaking events, either — largely because as a player I've been on the side where "Hey, it's time to go get involved in this world-shaking event or all the places and NPCs you're fond of will suffer." I really disliked being forced to choose between participating in a conflict that I don't care for or "paying for my choice" by having some of the setting elements I do care for removed.The real lesson, of course, is that when I'm setting conflicts into motion (such as NPCs preying on other NPCs in a way that PCs may notice and get involved in), I'm careful to pick those that I can guess my players are going to enjoy. But I'm not crazy enough to assume that I won't ever make a mistake, so absolutely I have a backup plan. In the sense of a historical game, yes, I think it's important for the sense of being there that history does not alter without player intervention. In the sense of a fictional setting, though, one that's ostensibly created solely for the purpose of players, there's less of that impetus. I feel it's good to keep in mind at all times that the setting is there to serve the players, unless everyone agrees otherwise. That can mean a lot of different things, but it does tend to prompt me to think about alternate answers to "what if we held a war and nobody wanted to game through it?"I think a setting would be damaged if the war between, let's call it Bretonnia and the Empire, suddenly died out and was never mentioned again because the players said "ugh, not what I'm here for." But if the players wanted to keep rollicking around the border more than anything, then maybe it would be time for some sort of adventure to crop up wherein they can avert the war in some fashion, or at the very least shove some NPCs into resolving it, depending on the tastes of the players. That fits well, and makes perfect sense. Pendragon's not quite my cup of tea — for various reasons, I'm most interested in legacies that can be transmitted in ways other than natal inheritance — but it suits the simulationist elements to a game like that quite well. So have I. I'm always interested in seeing how people run games unlike my own. Sometimes there's even stuff to steal.</blockquote>

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