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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 8234244" data-attributes="member: 23751">"What do you literally do as a GM to foster protagonism? How do your notes help or hinder this?"Which protagonism?  Their side's definition or ours?  If it's the other side's definition, the notes don't help or hinder.  It's simply a matter of different playstyles.  One side allows players to author content, and the other doesn't does so in very limited capacity which is up to individual DMs.  For example, I allow the players to create villages, NPCs, specific monsters, etc. during background creation.  They write up their background, and as long as it's not conflicting with known Forgotten Realm lore or Forgotten Realm lore as created by my prior campaigns, it's all good. "What other actual practices do you use/follow/apply to achieve protagonism?" Again, if we're talking about the definition the other side uses, very little.  I did an experiment with my group about 4-5 years ago.  I ran a 3.5 campaign where I made each PCs the offspring of a Realms god.  Then I had a lost Imaskari artifact which hadn't been used before their fall, be found and triggered by Imaskari remnants.  The artifact basically locked  the gods out of the Realms and divine magic failed completely, or almost completely.  Each PC, whose parent I rolled randomly and they discovered early in game play, had a direct connection through their blood to their god, so their divine powers worked.  Each PC also had "powers" that matched their parents sphere of influence and I let them know that they could try anything they liked that fit that theme.  For instance, one PC had Talos the Destroyer as his father.  If he came to a door, he could attempt to cause the wood and iron in the door to rot and rust away, destroying it.  I wanted to see how they would react to being able to just create abilities(within the theme) to influence the world, but they did surprisingly little with it.  Most of what they tried, despite my reminding them a number of times that they could get creative, was just duplication spells that were in theme.If we're talking our definition of protagonism, which is complete control over what their characters do, then my notes don't help or hinder that, either.  The players let me know what kind of campaign they want me to run during session 0, so they have at least that much control.  Then I work on stuff, mostly outlining a story that will go through the world on that theme.  They then usually, since they picked the theme, decide to undertake that story.  However, they will often skip portions of what I have prepared and/or insert their own ideas on how to go about succeeding at their goal.  Often those ideas come out of left field and I have nothing prepared for it, but I'm pretty good at improv so we go in that direction anyway.  Once, they decided that the theme as I prepared it wasn't to their liking and not only did they decide to ignore it, but they went the opposite direction and decided to become pirates.  Sooooooooo, I ran a pirate campaign while the original story ran on without them.  They heard rumors and pieces of what was going on, and because it was world spanning a few of their adventures did touch on the story tangentially, but by and large it happened without them and went much worse than it should have, because no PC group was there to stem the damage.</blockquote>

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