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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8234320" data-attributes="member: 85870">So I'm fully sympathetic to claims of GMs and players who say that prefabricating campaign content doesn't remove the ability for the players (through their PCs) to set and pursue goals within the fiction. If I'm being honest, I think my "ideal" kind of RPG play would be a merging of an interesting, dynamic, realized campaign setting with players/PCs being able to strongly pursue character agendas and goals within the setting. And I think it was [USER=23751]@Maxperson[/USER] who talked about how his group's purpose of play isn't to "reveal the GM's notes," it's to pursue their character's agenda. The GM's "notes" merely create the situational framing / genre conventions in which that pursuit takes place.The issues I always ran into as a GM who was attempting to prefabricate an "interesting, dynamic, and realized" setting, was that too often it felt like that the player goals generally 1) were rather shallow; 2) were only peripherally related to other group pursuits; 3) required a significant amount of negotiation / "Mother-may-I?" or outright "handwavium" to make them the focus of play; 4) the traditional rules of Savage Worlds give zero guidance for how to "make GM moves" that puts the players into tight spots and dynamically flow the downstream effects of what the PCs do within the world.As a result, as a GM I almost never felt like the players were "protagonists" in their own story, so much as being carried along by the "grace of the GM's whims" toward whatever goal they were pursuing.Part of the issue too is that despite the ability for the players to set goals and pursue agendas, they were always necessarily limited by the reach of their locus of control. There's one particular Savage Worlds campaign I'm thinking of, where the players ended up interacting with a very limited set of the total prefabricated elements, because they couldn't envision or imagine ways in which their characters could effect change within the framing of those elements. So they just ignored them.So the question for me became --- how do I better integrate the PCs' dramatic needs into the fictional framing without just full-on asking them, "So, your PC wants to accomplish X. What barriers to that end goal to you foresee as coming to pass? And how will it be fun for you to approach and overcome those challenges from within the space of your character and the fiction?"That approach felt . . . unsatisfying. It felt dangerously close to violating the Czege Principle. But perhaps it wouldn't have been if we had set the challenges in front of us together . . . but then left the pursuit and resolution of those challenges to the play at hand? To use an earlier example --- "Oh, so you want to become the supreme leader of the barbarian tribes of the north? All righty then, well, to accomplish that, you'll first need to do something profoundly meaningful enough to attract the attention of each tribe's leader---like, say, defeat the frost dragon that haunts the great ice caves, or defeat the great Wyvern, or reclaim the lost spear of Uthganian, or recover enough unobtanium to forge the world's greatest axe, or whatever. Next, you'll need to either sway or eliminate any resisting tribal leaders. Next, you'll need to convince the tribespeople that you do have their best interests at heart. So where do you want to start?"So I suppose setting up that kind of framing isn't a Czege Principle violation . . . there's still plenty of room for the player to pursue those challenges.But the longer I look at that list, the more I begin to see how without player-facing resolution mechanics how hard it would be frame those situations. With only basic, traditional, task-resolution mechanics (like Pathfinder or Savage Worlds, which is what I know best), they either have to do it through direct combat prowess---because that's what 90% of the mechanics are focused on---or the GM has to specifically frame some other way to resolve those challenges that isn't just about the party killing whoever/whatever is in front of them.And then suddenly we're right back where we started---the GM's notes on how these challenges can be resolved are now the controlling factor as to whether a PC can or can't succeed at their stated goal.So for me, it's a difficult conundrum. Because I want those strongly realized, in-depth campaign settings. They're immensely satisfying to build and watch "come to life" in play. But I don't know that they really give my players as much true control over their characters, but only the illusion of control.</blockquote>

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