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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8244495" data-attributes="member: 7016699">I can think of a number of ways:I have less fun at the table if the players have less fun--even without the threat of players leaving. The dead silence of a table where no one is having fun is a nightmare.The easiest way to keep the players engaged is to make their suspension of disbelief as easy as possible, to make it easy for them to conspire with me to keep the story believable. So, prior events absolutely serve as a constraint on me as the GM, both for narrative consistency and for ... judicial consistency, I guess (ruling the same way). While I don't think of GMing as being a perfect parallel to writing fiction, it's not unlike a writer of fiction wanting to maintain consistency and continuity over the course of a story.The players who have given me information about their characters, have given me ways to tie their characters to the setting and to the campaign. If someone tells me, "My character's lover disappeared, and I want to find them," they've told me something about a kind of story they want to have emerge during play; if I want to keep that player engaged, I'd do well to have that at least as a repeating thread--and it seems like a good idea to have that resolve during play (in the instance I'm thinking of, the player has said he doesn't think the character would keep adventuring after finding her lover, so it either needs to be at the end of the campaign, or we need to work on a replacement character).The players have signed up for a game where their characters are the protagonists. That is a constraint on the scenes and story-threads I frame in. The players have an expectation of fair play. That is absolutely a constraint on me. I think the fact some GMs act as though those aren't constraints is unfortunate--the horror stories are real, and they shouldn't happen ever.As you might guess, I feel quite constrained as a GM, even in a system like D&D 5E that really doesn't mechanically restrict my options much.</blockquote>

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