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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7327140" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your paraphrase of my question is more pointed than the one I asked - I asked "what is it for", not "why not drop it for these other methods"! But I'm certainly all for exploring consequences of using some techniques rather than others.Of your five points, (i) to (iiI) clearly can be accomplished, pretty easily, in other ways than having the GM do it in advance of play. Eg players can write their own backstory for PCs, and establish their own goals with stakes implicit in them. I think I've given plenty of examples in the thread, plus links to actual play posts that provide further illustrations. So I think the putative contrast of GM builds a dungeon or else it heads-down in the dungeon is not an actual contrast: I haven't run a campaign that could be described as "heads-down in the dungeon) since about 1985.Of course if the players don't want to contribute to (i), (ii) or (iii) but nevertheless want a camaign with those sorts of elements, the GM will have to do it: presumably these are players who don't object to the GM decding what the campaign will be about, determing all the major outcomes, etc. (I assume this is the target audience for APs.)Your (v) has been affirmed strongly by some posters in this thread. Clearly it can't be achieved by having someone other than the GM do it.Your (iv) is interesting, and I don't think anyone else in the thread has stated it as clearly as you do. It relates in part to "no myth".No myth is not "no prep". No myth is, at it's heart, no secret backstory. That is, no manipulation of the fiction "behind the scenes" by the GM to generate particular outcomes, and no reliance upon unrevealed backstory to block action declarations independently of the resolution mechanics. Another way to put it: there is no secret fictional positioning in virtue of which delcared actions can nevertheless fail because the framing conditions weren't right.I preppped for my Traveller campaign - I had some NPCs pregenerated (though I didn't use any in the first session) and I had some worlds pregenerated (and I used three of them in the first session). But those worlds didn't become part of the shared fiction until they were introduced in the course of play. And I didn't use any of them as the starting world - that was something I wanted to roll in front of the players, thereby subjecting myself to the same discipline that they'd had to in generating their PCs.A shared sense of genre and/or "big picture" is also not at odds with the spirit of No Myth. Showing the players a map, or an illustration, or saying "I want to run a default 4e game - the race and god descriptions will show you what I mean" is consistent with the spirit of No Myth. That stuff is all part of the shared understanding of what the game will be about, what it's tropes will be, etc.This stuff also feeds directly into your (iv) - it's not a coincidence that I frame my players into a situation where they are dealing with an assault on the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen! The stuff established by means of (i), (ii) and (iii) - both at the campaign's start, and over a number of years of play - means that I have plenty of material to help me prepare challenges, to come up with ideas for things that will push my players hard.My interest is in outcomes. Local outcomes, whose main context is the particular episode in that session - what do the PCs see when they look around the Mausoleum? Are their cartouches from which they can learn the Raven Queen's origina name? And bigger outcomes, whose context is the whole campaign - do the PCs join with Jenna to try and defeat the Raven Queen, or help Kas defend her Mausoleum, or do they oppose both? As it turns out, they stopped Jenna and so, for the moment, helped the Raven Queen. But it could have gone the other way. And the biggest outcome of all is lurking there too - is the Dusk War coming, or not? Within the fiction, there's an answer to that question, as it's a cosmological fact. But at the table, we don't know yet because it hasn't been played to its resolution.This is what I think is at the heart of "no myth" or "play to find out".And so I guess I would ask - was it important that (i) to (iii) be done by you rather than the players, or was that just happenstance? Was (v) important for you? - in which csae, presumably, there was no other way to get it. And with regard to (iv), what was the role of unrevealed backstory in shaping adjudication of action declarations?</blockquote>

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