Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9262926" data-attributes="member: 4937">And my main point is that the two things are not nearly so different as you pretend.  While a typical adventure rarely makes the decision tree as obvious as a multiple choice (though it can, "Turn left or turn right", for example) very often the list is implicit (again, "Turn left or turn right") and the players are fundamentally just guessing what is on the multiple choice list by playing "Mother may I?"Yes, it is true that the fundamental advantage to having a DM over a choose your own adventure book or a computer game is that the GM can choose to pencil in new choices and pages in response to player decisions, but that this in no way changes the fact that the referee is the one presenting the pages and placing the passages and thus the players options might not be meaningful in the sense you think they are.  I think the game Mass Effect, which is one of the best cRPGs ever made (especially Mass Effect 1), is a really good exercise in this because multiple playthroughs let you look behind the scenes and realize how you can give players plenty of choices while still keeping a story on rails.Where you really see actual difference between choose your own adventure books and table top RPGs happens at a bigger level of the meta, in that the GM is empowered to not only insert pages into the story but write completely new books to represent differences in game state at the end of the game.  You see this in how Mass Effect 2 fails, because the developers would have really had to write multiple independent games to truly reflect any real change that happened in Mass Effect 1, so they fundamentally reset to square one and just changed the drapes.A lot of the art of being a good GM is just hiding the rails so that players have a sense of true freedom.  But the players can't go where nothing exists and likely will never even think to do so.  That multiple choice at the bottom of a page is more relevant to a tabletop RPG than you think.Note that it's possible for the players to have meaningful choices and be protagonized without having true freedom.</blockquote>

Verification