Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7340494" data-attributes="member: 42582">No. My claim is that there is a difference between helping establish the shared fiction, and having someone else preauthor it and provide it to you.I looked at a little bit of Critical Role, and it looked pretty GM-driven to me.If the GM is driving the players through a series of fetch-quests and McGuffin hunts, then what you say might be true. If the game is actually player-driven in the sorts of ways I've described, where the whole orientation of play is towards the dramatic needs of the PCs (as build and/or played by their players) then it's not so at all.To give an obvious literary example, The Quiet American can't just be reworked by changing the setting from Vietnam to Korea, changing Pyle from American to Chinese, and changing Fowler from English to Russian. Or by making Phuong a friend rather than a lover.And just confining myself to the small episode of play described above and referenced in your thread, it matters that the assassin is a friend of the mage PC; that the assassin had earlier, in a duel of wits, extracted a promise from the mage PC to help defeat the brother; that the dominated PC is trying to capture the mage for his naga master; that the mage PC does not want to completely destroy his relationship with Jabal (whose tower it is); etc.The relationship affects the players because of their role in establishing it. They have chosen (eg) to play Raven Queen devotees; or Nightcrawler; or a mage with a demon-possessed brother.Addressing that, in play, and allowing the players' responses to actually shape the ingame situation, is significant. Conversely, treating such material as the stuff for "sidequests", or as mere colour (eg the Raven Queen devotee says a prayer over killed foes), or as background that explains why the PC is ready to adventure, has a different (more-or-less opposite) significance.</blockquote>

Verification