Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7371766" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't agree that this is true in practice. As a player you're going to engage with your character, it has SOME sort of backstory, some preferences, likes, dislikes, SOMETHING will be expressed in play, even if the GM has to elicit it. I mean, in D&D, EVERY character has a race, and a class, presumably a gender and a name as well (I guess maybe those aren't literally required, except in 1e you must have a gender defined in some cases for mechanical reasons). So, AT WORST, you've defined SOMETHING about your PC.Once that happens the GM has what is needed in order to start framing some kind of conflict around what the character, at least implicitly, needs. A truly uninspired and passive player might require a skilled GM to use all their tricks to push things forward, but the point is that the choices which drive this are all PLAYER choices.Beyond that, there is nothing in a sandbox which lets the players off the hook in this respect! If they simply want to sit in the tavern and drink until their gold is spent and then lie in a gutter and starve, nothing prevents that. It will NOT be a very interesting game for 99.9% of us. Its true, in Story Now, the character's desire to do this will be confronted and a conflict will develop. Maybe he'll be swept up by a press gang and find himself an unwilling soldier. Does he risk death by trying to desert? Or does he make do? Maybe he learns to like it! An endless series of conflicts can arise from this player 'choice of no choice'. We could let the character rot in the ditch, but what is the point?OTOH if the players decide that their desire is to go exploring and have the world described to them, and then react to it or continue on to new destinations, or whatever, then why would a Story Now GM fail to deliver on that agenda? He might threaten the PCs ability to get to point X which they have set out for, but then again that isn't a given. There's no specific way that Story Now HAS to play out. I think this gets back to the whole pacing question we talked about back a few pages.</blockquote>

Verification