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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9331400" data-attributes="member: 42582">Can you provide us with the link? The last time someone produced an interview of Edwards supposedly repudiating his analysis, he wasn't at all.This is completely orthogonal to the issues that [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER], [USER=6925338]@soviet[/USER], [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] and I are talking about.In some RPGs, the motivations of the NPC Tyrant are set by the GM as part of the GM's prep. Examples include Apocalypse World (assuming the Tyrant is a threat), Sorcerer (based on Edwards commentary - I haven't read the whole rulebook) and Prince Valiant (at least in many of the "episodes"). In other RPGs, the motivations of a NPC are liable to be flexible, and settled fully as part of the process of adjudication and resolution. This is a technique that I use in 4e D&D (to accommodate check results within a skill challenge), Classic Traveller (to accommodate results on the reaction table, or the results of Streetwise or Admin or Bribery checks) and sometimes in Burning Wheel (if the NPC doesn't yet have Beliefs or Instincts written). My thinking on the second of the two approaches was heavily influenced by <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">this two-decades-old post by Paul Czege</a>:I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.As <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Ron Edwards explained</a>, also two decades ago, there's no particular connection between either technique and "story now" play:A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for "making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional for Narrativist play, but it is indeed an important issue for role-playing of any kind. So it's not a bad idea simply to ask, for a given group or session, when and how is the Explorative context (setting, situation, whatever) established? <ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">High improvisation during play: e.g., Universalis, InSpectres, Extreme Vengeance</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rock steady based on preparation - Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein, HeroQuest, Sorcerer</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In between - Trollbabe, The Pool, Dust Devils, My Life with Master</li> </ul> Many people get unnecessarily hung up on this issue ... playing Universalis is not "more Narrativist" than playing Orkworld, for instance. Also, this issue is not at all correlated with centralizing vs. distributing the various GM-tasks discussed previously.I don't know how you are using "stakes" here, as it is not how [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER] uses it, and it is not how Baker or Edwards uses it.The players have desires. Some of those desires are about what happens to their PCs in the fiction. Typically those will be aligned with imagined desires of the PC. The NPC also has desires, typically authored by the GM (assuming a conventional allocation of tasks to players and GM). Conflict will result if those desires come into conflict - what is at stake in that conflict is, roughly, what the characters are fighting about.The crux of player-driven vs GM-driven RPGing, when we are talking about stakes, is - who decides what is going to be at issue in these conflicts? Or, more generally, who decides what scenes, and play as a whole, is about? That is quite different from the question who authors the desires and motivations of the NPC.For instance, in my Torchbearer 2e game, various actions taken by, and decisions made, by the players meant that two things that were at stake were what will the NPC Gerda's future be? and what will the fate of the cursed Elfstone be? I was the one who made decisions about NPC motivations that oriented them towards these stakes: I decided that Gerda, having been a bandit, would steal the Elfstone, and subsequently try to retain it when the PC Fea-bella wanted it back; and I decided that the NPC Megloss would oppose rather than join with Gerda, to try and get the Elfstone for himself. That first decision was motivated, in part, by a desire to set up conflict between the PCs, as Gerda was the PC Golin's friend but, by stealing the Elfstone, would become an enemy of Fea-bella. The second decision was motivated, in part, by the fact that Megloss was (as a matter of stipulation during the course of initial PC build) an enemy of Fea-bella, and the game rules state that the GM should "use" enemies to establish opposition, trouble etc for the PCs of whom they are enemies.The detailed technique is not the same as setting up a AW threat. But the basic idea is not wildly different.I don't think this is very interesting at all, to be perfectly honest.The fact that different RPGers have different preferences is a pretty straightforward observation. What is non-trivial is identifying useful techniques for actually satisfying those preferences. For instance, reading the Paul Czege post that I quoted above opened my eyes to an approach to GMing NPCs that I had not consciously though of before. Putting it to work made my GMing better at satisfying my preferences.</blockquote>

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