Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8444297" data-attributes="member: 6790260">1) Yes.2) No, but they are something similar: improvisational actors creating a shared experience. This can mean varying degrees of "narrative" depending on what is desired.3) Yes, sometimes. Definitely before play (that's literally what backstory is), sometimes during. It's a matter of give and take as to what specifically happens.4) Nope! They're much more like the actors in the show. The DM is like a director that also acts some of the parts, and does some writing.  Each character is shaped by the person playing them, and the world can and will change based on who's playing each character.5) Yes and no--on all fronts. The players are trying to accomplish goals. They choose the goals they find interesting, based on the information they can glean about the world. How they choose to pursue those goals is up to them. The "choose interesting goals" thing corresponds best to "make the most interesting story," but not perfectly so--sometimes goals can be only weakly associated with narrative per se. Because these are goals they want to accomplish, and because there will be obstacles to doing so, they will want to leverage their resources and work as hard as they can to succeed--in other words, the first thing you said, but not necessarily in a "beat everything" way, more like...it's smart to do what things make you more likely to succeed way. And, finally, the specific methods they pursue, and indeed whether certain methods even occur to them at all, are conditioned by "what the character would do"--such statements should never be excuses, but they realistically should inform times when a character wouldn't behave in certain ways because it would violate their principles or whatever.Particularly for #1, this mostly reflects my belief that DMs need to be beholden to many of the same restrictions players are. E.g., if players are not allowed to roll a die and then claim that that die says something other than what it actually says, then DMs should not be allowed to do that either.</blockquote>

Verification