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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9078745" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay.So...don't you as DM put things into the world to make a more interesting narrative? Don't you write character backstories so that their narrative will be engaging and interesting rather than formlessly generic or dull?Because people raise this Boogeyman of "players just summon entire plotlines and end entire arcs with a waive of a hand" and it is honestly incredibly tedious because I've never seen a single person actually play that way, and in the vast majority of cases, it isn't even possible to play that way in the kinds of games people discuss.Hence, I still don't see the difference between Conan having a backstory that includes Thulsa Doom and Thulsa Doom reappearing later as an opponent without Conan specifically seeking him out and a DM adding spice to the ongoing situation by developing a connection between a current threat the party has taken interest in and the bad things that have happened to one or more characters in their past. It is, from Conan's perspective, pure coincidence that Thulsa has chosen to become a priest of Set; it makes for a more gripping experience, because the two have an emotional connection that would not be present if the Priest of Set were some random dude. And it is quite clear that the reason it's Thulsa and not Random Set Priest #6 is that it is more interesting for that connection to appear. In an improvisational form like TTRPGs, there is no need to have a fixed, planned, set, unalterable, unbending, unyielding "story" (since apparently that is what people think "story" means now...) The discovery that the warlock amassing a strange and subversive cult outside the city is none other than Pulsa Boom, Priest of Beats, who enslaved Gonad's tribe many long years ago, does not suddenly lock everything into a single, inexorable, hyperspecific chain of events. It may, of course, amp up the party's desire to fight the warlock and his cult! But perhaps they also find out that the cult is keeping something nasty imprisoned, and just killing them would be Very Bad. There is no clearly right or wrong choice here. There are just things which exist in the world, and which will bring consequences if the players succeed at changing them. Which, importantly, is not the same as "always getting everything you want forever." You can succeed at something only to find out that that success has consequences you really wish you had known about or predicted before they happened.What consequences are the players willing to accept? What risks are they willing to take, should their efforts fail, or get derailed? What costs are they willing to pay for success? What will they do if they discover new things later which make them reevaluate? I have no idea. That's what we play to find out. That's the narrative of the game, which doesn't have this ridiculously rigid....scripting that people seem so fearful of they would actively rather play a less interesting game just to make sure it never rears its fictitious head.</blockquote>

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