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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8234909" data-attributes="member: 42582">Over the past few years I've GMed two AD&D one-offs: one using X2 Castle Amber, one using random dungeon generation from DMG Appendix A.In both games the players made choices that drove the action in the sense that (i) those actions moved the PCs on the map and hence (ii) determined who/what the PCs encountered, leading to (iii) player decisions about what to do with those encounters. Neither was a game about the dramatic needs of the PCs. The PCs didn't even have dramatic needs! They had races, classes, names, alignments, a little bit of colour, but otherwise these games were just for fun with a bit of skilled play.I've played AD&D games in which the GM had pre-authored scenarios, and the players had to choose how their PCs responded to villains, threats, strange situations, etc. In some of those games the PCs had dramatic needs, but the game wasn't about those. They were peripheral to the action of the game as perceived and managed by the GM.In my Classic Traveller game some of what happens is driven by the dramatic needs of the PCs. But some is not. For instance: when the PCs travelled to the world of Ashar in order to get high-tech medical treatment for one of their number, the motivation was really procedural rather than dramatic. When they took a job from a member of the main Ashar government - determined via the system's random patron mechanic - this spoke to dramatic needs only in the very basic sense that the starship owner needs money to pay for fuel and crew salaries. And in contrast: that job required the PCs to use their orbital laboratory to spy on a neighbouring country, which revealed what seemed to be the spearhead of an Imperial invasion of Ashar, probably motivated by the Imperial policy of suppressing psionics. That spoke to various PC dramatic needs. One of the PCs found herself charged, tried and convicted on Ashar, and subject to banishment as her punishment - she crossed over into the same neighbouring country, when she encountered some fugitives (via the random encounter rules) I connected them into the psionics issue, and she was in due course able to hook up with the other PCs. And the fugitives were then able to tell the PCs where to find a branch of the Psionics Institute.When I play Burning Wheel, everything is driven by PCs' dramatic needs. That's central to that game. This is a point of contrast with Traveller as my group plays it, and even moreso with the AD&D play that I've described.Nothing in my knowledge of RPGing makes me think that what I'm describing here, including the posibility of signicant stretches of play in which PCs' dramatic needs are not driving the game, is unique to me.</blockquote>

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