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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7731996" data-attributes="member: 42582">We've had this discussion before. Everything you say here is not true.Here are four mysteries that were signalled in the actual play reports I quoted in the post you replied to:* Who killed the veiled alliance contact? * Who killed 29's master? * Why are Norhern Lights behaving strangely? * What is the nature of Lt Li's bioweapons program?The Dark Sun game is about three sessions in. The first mystery is resolved - in the second session, a fourth PC was introduced as the assassin. The second mystery is still open. Furthermore, there is potential foreshadowing there - the purse with 14 gp may turn out to be very significant. (We don't know yet.)The Cortex+ Heroic game is about fiwe sessions in. That mystery hasn't been resolved yet, as the PCs have failed to gather any significant amount of information about it - all they know is that the giant shaman has also seen signs of pending doom (this was the result of a player spending a resource to establish a social resource at the giants' court, as is described in the post that I linked to above).The Traveller game is also about five session in. The mystery of the bioweapons program remains unresolved, but some things have been learned. Here's a non-exhaustive list: that there were agents of the program on the world of Byron; that Lt Li kidnapped and (it seems) infected a marine who was convalescing in a naval hospital (this was a PC introduced in the second session); and that there are Imperial officials who are suspicious of her activities and want them to be further investigated (this followed one of the players triggering a patron encounter roll, and the roll delivering a Diplomat as propsective patron).And to step back from examples to the more general point: imagine if you (Lanefan) read a post saying it was impossible to run a successful D&D campaign that ran for more than 5 years. Or that involved conflict between PCs. You would think those claims were absurd, because your own play experience is of (successfully) running and playing in campaigns that run for more than 5 years, and include conflict between PCs.Well, that's how I respond to your claim above, which frankly comes across as based purely ignorance. It's not that you've tried to run a game in the way I'm describing and found it hard to have mysteries or complex storylines. You're just speculating. And I'm here to tell you, on the basis of actual play experience, that it can be done and it's not very hard.This is also just wrong.Here's something to discover in my Traveller game: what is the nature of Lt Li's bioweaons program? That's unknown. But it's not a secret, because I - the GM - don't know either.Here's a more banal example from the same campaign: what sorts of vessels do the bioweapons conspirators have access to? In the first session, all we knew was that they used to have a yacht, but then (as part of his backstory) one of the PCs won it from them gambling. (This was the backstory that explained the noble PCs ownership of a yacht.) Hence the reason that Lt Li had to recruit the players to ferry materials from Ardour-3 to Byron - it was the PCs who had the necessary ship!In the fourth session, it became clear that the conpsirators also had access to another vessel capable of firing on surface targets from orbits. It was established that this was the laboratory research vessel St Christopher. (Which I had taken from an old White Dwarf adventure, Amber to Red.) I decided to introduce the St Christopher into the game after generating a NPC - an ex-naval forward observer - on my bus ride to the house of my friend hosting the session. I was driven by two thoughts - I thought it would be fun to test out the directed fire rules; and I thought having a NPC call down directed fire onto the PCs would drive some action and decision-making, which would prevent the game bogging down in investigation and indecision at the bioweapons outpost the PCs had taken over at the end of the previous session - and the debates at the wind-down of that session had made be a bit worried that the players might get bogged down. As it turns out, my plan to force some decision-making worked; and at least a couple of the players also found the "drive our ATVs across the barren world trying to avoid getting blown up by laser fire being called in from an orbiting ship" epsiode exciting.Then, in the most recent session, as the PCs were departing from their orbit around the world that is the source of the bioweapons conspirators' pathogen, the starship encounter roll turned up an encounter with a pirate patrol cruiser. The PCs decided to intercept this cruiser's communications (I can't now remember why - I think the players were supsicious of a cruiser turning up on a fairly isolated world uninteresting for anything but this pathogen) and learned that it had jumped from Olyx, Lt Li's base world and the PCs next intended destination. The decision to have the "piratical" nature of the cruiser be its connection to the bioweapons conspiracy was mine, as GM - made on the basis of the principle "Always go where the action is." It established that the conspirators also have access to a patrol cruiser (not too surprising given the strong involvement of Imperial marines, naval and scouts personnel that had already been established in play); and it prompted discussion over what will probably be the main focus of next session: do the PCs try and take control of this cruiser for their own purposes? (<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?607662-Should-the-PCs-try-and-capture-the-NPC-starship" target="_blank">Here's a thread I started</a> to get advice for my players on this question.) The general point: there can be systems and methods for introducing new content into the game that don't require the GM to have authored it in advance. Random encounter checks are one; scene framing techniques are another (and the previous two paragraphs you how you combine these two - "indie"-style Classic Traveller); the sort of system that let the player introduce the giant shame into the game is another.That's one way to run a game. My point is that it's not the only way.This is very obvious. Notice also that I don't have to decide anything about the NPCs at that particular moment of play in order to do this.Also, "juggling things behind the scenes" just means "keep various possibilities in mind when later deciding what would be an interesting thing to introduce into the game".I have never said any such thing. I have said that the GM does not use secret backstory as a factor in adjudication.To give a concrete example: when the player wants to spend a resource to establish (in the scene) a giant shaman who is sympathetic to the PCs' cause, under my principles I'm not allowed to veto that action declaration on the basis that there is no giant shaman there.Here's an example of some backstory that wasn't know by the players until they discovered it in play: Lt Li is a bioweapons conspirator (the players discovered that when the PC spy seduced her, and successfully interrogated her, and I had to make up some stuff for her to tell him); the bioweapons conspiracy is based on the planet Olyx (I can't remember excalty when I made this up, but I think it was introduced after the PCs took over the research outpost on Byron and interrogated the people they had captured there); the bioweapons conspirators have access to the various vessels I menteiond above.The difference between authoring in advance and authoring in response to player action declarations and other discussion and interaction at the table is that the former is (in my view) railroading, as it is the GM who establishes all the possibilities and outcomes of investigation and action; whereas the latter is a collective endeavour ini which the fiction that emerges contains elements resulting from the contributions and participation of everyone at the table.That's a statement of preference - you would rather have the GM read you his/her notes than participate in jointly creating a shared fiction - but it doesn't show that the latter can't be done. (By the way, I don't really follow "Schroedinger's Universe". The imaginary universe doesn't become more "real" because it was written yesterday rather than today. The Schroedinger phenomenon in particle physics is interesting and surprising because one generally takes the real world to have an existence and character that is independent of human interaction with it. But no one but a child would suppose that imaginary worlds exist indpedently of their human creators.)Well, they might tell the difference because they can see that their contributions are having an effect on the content of the shared fiction. In any event, I don't know why you would do this, given it seems to contradict the very strong preference you state in the sentence I quoted just above.</blockquote>

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