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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mamba" data-source="post: 9087404" data-attributes="member: 7034611">I like that description, but want to focus on one partthat to me sounds like first of all the story is emergent, not somewhat roughly laid out, with enough room to ‘breathe’. You know what the themes are, because those come from the players, but not at all how things will develop.So the story unfolds at the table with no one beforehand knowing what will happen, not even to the degree to which a ‘traditional’ DM does (the rough layout).Does that mean there is no prep work at all, or are you thinking about these things ahead of time in a ‘if the opportunity arises, I’d …’ kind of way?How do you as the DM ensure that the story accomplishes the below in a satisfactory wayand does not just randomly meander all over the place without getting any closer to the climax?Is that built into the ruleset, and it keeps rising the tension by itself? Is that something you subtly nudge in that direction? Do the players decide that what just happened through rolls on some tables was good enough to constitute that rise and act accordingly? Do they keep rising the tension by bringing in new elements when they think it is a good time to do do? All of this?To put it into maybe the least charitable interpretation, is the story simply what outcome random rolls resulted in (plus the actions the players took either to achieve them or as a reaction to them) and how the group agreed to make sense of them to form as coherent a storyline as the rolls allowed (not just at the end, but throughout play, to maintain a consistent understanding of the situation)?To me it does sound a little like that, with the player introducing a new element (the item in the tower they had to leave long ago) when they think of it (I still maintain that is what they did, even when for the consistency of the world it is being framed as remembering).Some rolls decide how believable it is to only ‘remember’ this now / at all (so you do not remember that you left your pink pet dragon there and are now looking for that…), some more rolls determine whether they find the item, or what they find instead, and the DM (or players?) has to then on the fly make sense of what they actually found when it was not that item but some randomly rolled one, because obviously the DM had not planned for that other item to be there and what its implications are.I am not saying you cannot get interesting and most of all surprising stories that way, but I wonder about how to steer / control the story arc. Is that ‘just’ a matter of thinking on your feet, or does more go into it?</blockquote>

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