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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7383916" data-attributes="member: 82106">This is a mischaracterization which is pretty fundamental. You REALLY believe this??!!! I'm skeptical!Yes, in every game the player's actions are likely to elicit different responses from the GM, and vice versa. This is the fundamental nature of all human interactions. So your assertion is ridiculous on the face of it, and obfuscatory at best. The QUALITY of the interaction is vastly different, which is what is important here. In a GM-centered game, the GM always presents whatever fiction suites him, aside from cases dictated by the rules (IE in D&D usually the combat system, maybe some others to an extent). In a Story Now game the GM is inventing a scene frame, or consequences of an action resolution, from whole cloth purely in response and answer to the player's elicitation of fiction ON THAT SUBJECT. Now, sometimes in GM-centered play the fiction is a direct response to the players, though it is fairly often unrelated to their agenda (IE it is pre-defined content and thus unresponsive to player's story desires), or even contrary to it and quashing it in some cases. Sometimes in Story Now the GM might relate something that is only tangentially or incidentally related to the player's immediate concerns. The RQ interrupting a teleport is sort of like that, although it is a brief interjection and does bear pretty clearly on the following action. But of course Story Now absolutely DEMANDS that we do NOTHING ELSE but go directly to the most central climactic point in the story IMMEDIATELY (even though said thing doesn't even exist yet). Don't be silly. The GM is perfectly free to, and probably should if it will improve the story, challenge the character's beliefs by placing a 'damsel in distress' along the way. And where did anyone say that you have to go to 'the end of the story' right away? Why do you think this absurd thing? What even IS the end of the story when no story has yet been written??!! Oh, come now, you're just trying to nitpick, nobody takes this seriously. Furthermore, in the WA cosmology, Torog is pretty much explicitly set up to be challenged. He's probably the weakest of the gods (except Lolth, and maybe Zehir, both evil gods designed to be opponents). He's certainly the most accessible, in theory you can literally trudge on foot to his realm and meet him in person without any supernatural anything. He literally just lives in a cave (albeit a huge cave very deep in the Earth, etc.). Again, this seems itself like a mischaracterization. There will be a wide variety of significance and degree of relevance to the character's core issues in the various scenes and actions in a Story Now game. The action is guaranteed to relate to SOME character's 'needs', or to a central theme of the genre, or something like that, but 4 out of 5 PCs probably aren't fully engaged by any one scene, and a scene might be only a tiny step on a way to some goal.Consider, 4e assumes 8 encounters per level x30 levels = 240 encounters (plus at least 2 quests per level = 60 quests) in a full campaign before the narrative reaches its resolution. PLENTY of those are bound to be scenes where the characters are simply working through some situation many steps removed from any final resolution of even intermediate goals.</blockquote>

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