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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8451278" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Since this is the meat of your argument, I figure it best to address this bit (well, that and the fact that you so strongly dislike my usual style of posting.)And the thing is...this isn't the relevant counter-argument, at least not for me.The relevant counter-argument is, "But what about the DM that feeds on player creativity in order to be creative herself? What about the DM that struggles to get invested in things unless they already know the players are invested?"You presented a DM polling their players as if it were the most horrific thing in existence--as if it were a DM completely abdicating any and all authorship or direction and running a setting by committee. And that's...just emphatically not what I would ever do, even though I absolutely DO "poll" my players, regularly requesting feedback and analysis, floating ideas or requesting prospective adventure things that the players think sound fun.See, I suffer a really severe problem with analysis paralysis when it comes to writing, or as I prefer to call it, "the tyranny of the empty page," and I don't mean "writer's block" by that (even though some use that phrase to describe writer's block). For me, it's that if I'm merely given the prompt of "do whatever you like," I can't conjure a single damn thing to mind. The absolute freedom to do whatever I like becomes an inhibition, invisible bars as strong as iron that completely surround me. I've had this problem since I was eight, doing creative writing assignments for school in 2nd grade.Give me a specific prompt, on the other hand--sometimes as minimally specific as "tell a story about a particularly strong sensation you experienced in the past"--and suddenly my mind is racing with ideas, it's as if the words leap from my mind like the arrow that springs from the bow. That is why I poll (or, rather, more like "interview") my players about what they want to see. Because even something as simple as "y'know, I'd like to do some more archaeology stuff, that very first foray we had was pretty cool and we haven't done much like that in a while" is enough to grease the wheels of my creativity and send me off to the races.And my players would be the first to tell you that I do not abdicate the creative process whatsoever. I'm dead certain you've seen me babble about the devil/demon stuff, among other bits and bobs of the setting that I'm quite proud of, and which are 100% my creation, without any player input. However, when I do get player input, that makes me even more excited, it jazzes me up, gets me pumped for doing new things, exploring new ideas. Such player input is also absolutely vital for my improvisation; I emphatically could not run sessions with half the interesting ideas, situations, or events if I weren't inspired by the things my players contribute.As an example, we've just had our party Bard accept and partially step into his role as (effectively) a Moses-like figure for an assassin cult, because in completing their initiation rites at a secret shrine in the desert, he has discovered a way to rehabilitate them into productive, non-murdery members of society without violating their beliefs. This was driven by a variety of things, but the original seed came from conversations I had with this player back before the original Session 0. The player asked, "Hey, can I play a tiefling? I just like the concept." So I said okay, and then asked, "Which of your parents is a tiefling?" He thought for a moment and replied, "Both of them, actually." BOOM. Suddenly I had a HUGE story hook--having two tiefling parents of different fiendish ancestry. A good quarter of all the adventures the party has had ultimately grew out of that conversation, which could ONLY have happened by asking the player what HE wanted and not simply dictating to the player what I intended to run.So...yeah. I'm not interested in using bad DMs as a counter-argument, because honestly, it doesn't matter what kind of campaign is being run if it's being run badly, you know? I'm talking about how I could not run anywhere near as fun a game as I do if I did not, on a semi-regular basis, solicit requests and suggestions from my players. This does NOT mean I'm some hands-off DM who doesn't create anything unless I get it signed in triplicate by my players. It just means that I really only thrive as a DM when I'm using a combination of stuff I find interesting and stuff my players have (directly or indirectly) told me they find interesting.</blockquote>

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