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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9092324" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=7020495]@Voranzovin[/USER]'s reply to this says a lot of what I was going to say.In 4e D&D, or Burning Wheel - which, as I've said, can be approached using many principles and techniques in common - the GM is non "servicing the player's desires". The GM is using the material provided by the players - the priorities they have established for their PCs - as the content and context for framing and narrating adverse consequences. In my 4e game, several players played Raven Queen devotees, and so naturally much of their opposition comes from Orcus and undead. One PC has an ambiguous relationship with Vecna, and so Vecna and his Eye, and Kas and his Sword, and Vecna cultists and opportunities for betrayal, all figure in play. Another PC serves Chan, Queen of Good Air Elementals, and so - as I've posted about already in this thread - the relationship of that PC and the PCs more generally to the Djinn and to Yan-C-Bin naturally becomes an element of the fiction. The PCs are divided in their orientation towards Law and Chaos, towards the gods and the Primordials and the mortal realm, and so the action of the game focuses on these conflicts, inviting and obliging the players to take sides and (via their PCs) make the marks.The only sense in which the players' desires are being serviced is that their contributions to the fiction are being honoured and built upon. This is why I talk about them exercising a high degree of agency over the fiction. For me, it contrasts with an approach to play where all the conflict and "movement" is authored by the GM as part of their setting, with an expectation that the players will first learn about what those conflicts and movements are (eg who are the factions, how are they related etc) and then make choices about how to relate to them.Obviously in the gameworlds of my 4e, BW etc game there are events, even important events, occurring that the PCs are not participating in - but, as I posted upthread, that stuff "minds its own business and doesn't trouble me or my players!" Or to put it less metaphorically, the fiction we actually establish at the table is the fiction that pertains to those player-authored priorities, and the challenges and opportunities that flow from them. That's where, as a GM, I am putting my effort and attention.The difference is vast, and I think you are missing it because you are not taking seriously intent and task - if the player succeeds at an action declaration, the intent and task come to pass and the GM is bound by that.This is how Yan-C-Bin and the Djinn become bound to an agreement with the PCs (as per my 4e example), how Megloss becomes obliged to help the PCs confront Gerda about the Elfstone (as per my Torchbearer example), why Thurgon and Aramina are able to find Evard's tower and, later on, why they meet Thurgon's brother Rufus (some of my Burning Wheel examples).This is very different from some widespread approaches to D&D play - AP play, or GM-setting-focused play - where the direction of events, the possible discoveries, etc are determined overwhelmingly by the GM and the players' role is to respond to those setting and/or plot elements that the GM is presenting to them.Just to be clear, while party play is a thing in (say) 4e D&D or in Torchbearer, it is not a thing in (say) Classic Traveller or Burning Wheel - the PCs are connected and interact, but they don't form a goal-oriented collective in the manner of a traditional D&D party.</blockquote>

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