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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9040331" data-attributes="member: 6785785">What brings the game to the wild west? Did it start there? Did the players decide to go there? Did the GM decide to bring them there? When they get there, do they have an agenda? Do they just wander around and experience random events? That's my fault, I had mixed up my A and B. I've edited my last post.I view it as A. I think it's A because the things happening are unrelated to the characters goals or themes. Again, my fault for mixing up my own points! I view this as B. If you're making the interesting things happen, then I think it would be a case of my B. The weirdness magnet angle is more A, where remarkable events keep happening around the characters that are unrelated to them. But here's the thing. Even a "random encounter" can be made dramatically relevant to the players' characters. So you roll brigands on your random encounter table, and we know that the Knight character has a Drive of "Justice". The PCs are on their way to the kingdom to prevent a major threat, but this random encounter occurs. They can avoid it and be on their way for their important goal... but does the Knight's sense of Justice supersede that goal? What does his decision say about him as a character? That's dramatically relevant. I think this idea that everything needs to be specifically connected to the PCs at all times is misleading. There's no reason even random encounters can't be made to be dramatically meaningful to one or more PCs. I think your C, D, and E can all be categorized under A or B, so I don't think I'm excluding anything. My point is that A and B are equally realistic (or equally unrealistic, depending on how you want to look at it), so any distinction between the two is simply a matter of preference. So using it as a measure of play doesn't really seem too meaningful. You could point at my game and say "wow, everything seems to revolve around the players' characters, that seems a bit too coincidental, no?" and I could point at your game and say "wow, nothing that happens to the players' characters has anything to do with them, that doesn't seem believable". Neither is right or wrong. And I also expect neither of our games would totally exclude A or B. So instead, let's look at what's happening outside of the fiction. What's happening in the game, at the table. Drop all appeals to realism, and tell me from a process standpoint, what's the difference between A and B?</blockquote>

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