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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7768559" data-attributes="member: 29398">I'm not sure Gygax didn't appreciate role-playing in his games; my guess - not having been there - is more that the whole notion of a player RPing an individual character was at the time still somewhat new, and he didn't quite know what to do with it or how to best incorporate it into his wargame-based system.  In the end he threw in some suggestions and then left it for individual tables and groups figure it out for themselves - which in hindsight was probably the best thing to have done.Agreed, though maybe not quite in such absolute terms.  In ongoing home-based games, yes.  In tournament or convention games (a much bigger thing in the early days), not so much.And, as a pleasant side effect, are probably also easiest for the average GM to design and run halfway well.  Agreed.Ah, but here's the thing: there's two ways of approaching this, and I think there's an OS-NS difference to be found here too.The OS one can best be summed up as 'the story is, or is made to appear, bigger than any character within it'.  The best example of this is, ironically, qute modern: Game of Thrones.  There's absolutely no guarantee, and no valid reason to expect, that any character who begins the story will still be around at the end - and this is true of a lot of OS play as well.  Characters come and characters go but the party* as an entity - and thus the story - survives; and the only thing that really hammers this is a full TPK with limited or no backup characters.  Also here the story in many cases is what it is no matter what characters happen to be involved, in part because the ongoing turnover means the GM doesn't always have much advance warning of what the party lineup will be at any given time, though the GM still has to be adaptalbe to players/PCs changing their minds as to what they want to do in the game world.* - or parties, there can certainly be more than one on the go.The NS one can be summed up as 'the characters are the story'.  Here there's an expectation built in to the game that a character who starts the story will very likely finish it unless the player decides otherwise.  This was first really seen on a big scale with 3e D&D with its move toward 1-20 character buildouts, because what's the point of building out 1-20 if you don't get to play it through?  There's also a lesser but still extant - maybe expectation is too strong a word, perhaps 'trend'? - that the GM will tailor the story to suit the characters on either or both of a large or small scale.   A side effect of this is that a GM often can't really plan out much (if any) of the story before the characters are rolled up, as she doesn't know what she'll have to work with.In both of these there's loads of wiggle room as to how the story gets developed and-or told and-or played through at the table, everything from hard railroad to full-on sandbox to make-it-all-up-on-the-fly.  The question is simply one of which is more important: the party overall, or the individual characters within it.</blockquote>

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