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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 7393404" data-attributes="member: 23751">I don't need to do it.  Game play being fun, will result in things like the players meeting kings and such.  The players are the ones that do it.  They tell me their motivation for their actions or roleplay as they go about it so that I am aware at that time.  The hard choices will come naturally.  If Pippin has joined the army and is in formation during Sauron's attack, does he break formation, putting his comrades in jeopardy in order to help Eowyn and Merry against the Witch King, or does he keep the formation, putting the lives of his friends at risk?  That flows naturally and requires no set up from me, yet presents a character defining challenge to the PC.  It's not my job to railroad the players.   Your players may have willingly gotten aboard the train by telling you ahead of time where they want you to take them, but it's still a railroad, albeit one that isn't bad.  I refuse to engage in railroading.Who died and made you the god of thematically compelling moments?  Depending on why and how it happens, both of those can easily be very thematically compelling moments.First off, I don't decide if Pippin is in the army.  He joins or doesn't  As to how I know if he's in the thick of things or on guard duty, I know because I don't break the social contract.  One of those choices is fun, the other costs me players.Both establish them.  The player establishes them by being proactive about what his PC wants and does.  See again my Northern Barbarians example.  The DM establishes them through creating encounters that he thinks will be fun and exciting for the players, and then letting the players engage those situations or not.  I never said that players in my game don't ever have agendas.  I said that agendas are not required to achieve the sorts of character arcs present in the LotR. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] already answered this quite well.  It can only be a DM menu if the players are forced to select from what the DM provides, which is never the case in my game. They are free to select from any, all or none of the relatively few options I provide, or select from the millions of possible items that they can come up with themselves.While the difference is significant, it doesn't keep both from being backstory authored by players.  And no, I'm not ignoring failures and the consequences of failure.  I'm saying success is authoring backstory since it is the player deciding that a secret door should be in the wall right over there.Obama kept repeating that we could keep our doctors, too.He also gives those three examples as players authoring backstory, which included authoring backstory through mechanical means, which would include your search check.All of those examples were of players authoring backstory.  He says the following right after those exampled, "The problem we have here(in direct reference to the three examples), specifically, is that when you apply narration sharing to backstory authority, you require the player to both establish and resolve a conflict, which runs counter to the Czege principle."He very strongly feels that the D&D method of splitting DM and player roles is the proper way to do things.  He says this in his blog."This is pretty much just my own opinion, call it an observation – I think that a logical division of tasks is important for a roleplaying game to such a degree that it actually prescribes and explains much of what we find interesting in the game in the first place. Specifically, I find that the riddle of roleplaying is answered thusly: it is more fun to play a roleplaying game than write a novel because the game by the virtue of its system allows you to take on a variety of roles that are inherently more entertaining than that of pure authorship. This is why many people find conch-passing games to pale next to a proper roleplaying game; the advocacy/referee/antagonism division of responsibilities is simply a more dynamic, interactive, emergent and fun way of crafting stories than undiluted and complete dramatic control for many of us. Authorship is work, advocacy is game."He's very much describing the style that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and I run as being a "proper roleplaying game".Correct.  That's why the PLAYER is authoring the secret door into the backstory, not the PC.  The player is just using the PC's mechanics to do so(assuming success).I don't consider it to be problematic in your playstyle, but it is narration sharing and does allow the authoring of backstory.It's not pre-authored, but it is heuristically authored in the moment by the player and is a use of backstory authority.  It's literally no different than the DM coming up with the temple in the moment, except for who authored it.Depends on the game.That has the same effect on other sort of games as well.  Let's say that instead of investigation, the player was looking for potions and said,  "I've heard rumors of these Moon cultists - it's said they brew powerful potions on the night of the new moon, to sell to those who are in need."  The player is still creating the solution to his need, even if that need isn't information.</blockquote>

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