Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 7371267" data-attributes="member: 2656">From a player point of view one of the big differences I see between GM-driven games and player-driven games is that conventional GM-driven games tend to encourage risk management and mitigation (even if the players don't bother with them). IMO this is the high level agency that can be provided by GM-driven games, where it is possible to discover threats and dangers, and then either choose to avoid them or engage them on the PC's terms. Random choices, where the players have insufficient information to make an informed choice, do not provide player agency. Choices where the players are misinformed or working on faulty assumptions aren't great either from an agency point of view, too many such choices can undermine a game.DM-driven games can train players to be risk-aware, or even risk-adverse. Making choices though a series of small procedural steps can give players the impression they can bail out if things turn bad, and reduces the number of single-big-risk choices they are presented with.Whereas in a player-driven game, the game is fundamentally about the risks players take, which are often complex high level questions of the sort that GM-driven games don't provide a method of directly addressing. Risk mitigation is much reduced in importance or even impossible. Conversely, risk management is often improved, in that the player(s) choose what risks to take and which not to take, often with more player information than in a GM-driven game. The negotiation step attempts to ensure that players have sufficient information to make an informed choice, rather than making random choices in a vacuum, and that whether the PC wins or loses, the player (hopefully) remains engaged in the game. Player-driven games can guarantee the prompt resolution of meaty questions important to players, while GM-driven games often don't. More than once in the latter case the answer turned out to be "That question was pointless in the setting but the GM wouldn't reveal that for ages over concern for campaign secrets. If I had know I wouldn't have played in the game in the first place."</blockquote>

Verification