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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6101319" data-attributes="member: 4937">Why should D&D be any different?No, but you aren't addressing what I consider the central issue in scene framing as a DM - diverse player agendas (where we must include the DM as a player of the game, even if he doesn't have the role of player).No one has suggested that if the scene is clearly not engaging for all the players, and it clearly isn't 'working' that we keep at it.  There are various techniques for 'moving on' that we could cover, and 'the handwave' is just one of them.  This really isn't a question of playstyle.   Even in serious exploratory play, you'll see various 'moving on' techniques.   Really, I think you whole 'playstyle' thing is increasingly obscuring any discussion.  You keep pushing this whole 'you play one way and I play the another' agenda that is getting really tiresome, because this isn't a situation where there are two nice clear buckets and players, GMs and groups always stay in one bucket.  This is a situation with 32000 colors and people paint with them as they please.  You might say, "I favor more greens than yellows" in my game, but treating everything as distinct non-overlapping categories rather than a multi-diminsional range of operations and methods used by one extent or another everyone who plays RPGs is beginning to look willfully obstinate to me.Speaking of.  The problem is that regardless of your play style, sometimes the problem is player failure to engage and sometimes the problem is GM failure to frame engagingly.  Learning how to engage is a player skill just as learning how to frame is a GM skill.  This is true regardless of how much burden we put on the GM.  Indeed, the more we rely on GM force the more we are also relying on GM skill, and the more we rely on player choice the more we are relying on player skill.   And while you can rely on different degrees of what you are calling (in my opinion obfuscatingly) "GM Force" (forcing my wry use of the concept of "player force"), the fact of the matter is all systems with a GM also have and make use extensively of "GM Force".I don't favor it, but I can put it in my conception because I've played systems - say Exalted - where that is a formalized mechanic in the rules.  Any system that formally rewards players for creative uses of narrative power - that is player agency and player driven scene framing - generally has the built in exception that if you utilize the same narration repeatedly, it loses its effectiveness.   You as a player have an expectation that you can frame scenes and be rewarded mechanically, but not that it will ever work twice.To a certain extent, I play D&D (and pretty much everything else) that way and have for about the last 20 years.  We call it 'discussing a PC's background' and it includes discussing things like 'what does the PC want from life' and 'what does this PC risk his life for' as well as looking at the PC's background and thinking about what adventures the player is offering me by telling this particular story.  Then I incorporate that into play, bringing into the game peices of the world that relate to that player specificly - friends, family, acquaintances, organizations, foils, villains, oppurtunities, etc.   However, I don't rely solely on player input for setting, and frankly neither does BW.pemerton, that's the sort of BS statement that makes me want to just get this over with and mute you.  I don't think you are intending to be condescending and insulting, but you know, I'm not sure I've ever played any RPG that lacked player input ever.  I imagine that there are some out there, but they are based on my experience the rare exceptions. Yeah, in my 1e, 2e, and 3e play as well.   It is not something amazing or novel to suggest player agendas shape play, nor is it in my experience highly unusual for player agendas to shape play.  Every RPG expects the player's agenda to shape play, even if you are playing something as restrictive on play as a published adventure path (and in the hands of a good DM, those aren't so restrictive).  Heck, look at something like 'Knights of the Dinner Table' which is about the humor in disfunctional player agendas, but player agendas always dominate play - much to the frustration of the long suffering DM who wants his table to have more literary agendas (which often leads to table conflict with humorous results).That's bog standard DMing.  You haven't fleshed out everything.  You can't flesh out everything.  The player engaged with the environment in a way you really hadn't htought about yet, so you needed to make something up.  You thought about the scene and made a reasonable choice about hitherto unexplored NPC depth and background.  But note that what you didn't do was actually let the player frame a scene, assume narrative authority, or anything of the sort.  There is nothing unusual about your DMing choice in what you call 'simulationist' play.  It's so standard I'm not even sure it qualifies as 'narrativist' in any fashion, or if it does that just reinforces my belief that the whole GNS theory is so fundamentally flawed that it may need to be scrapped.  What you did is the sort of GM choice you are just free to make and often should make regardless of your style, which means your 'style' wasn't even really important to the scene you just discussed.  The only 'style' differences I can think of here is some DMs would probably rely on their sense of the character in question, others would assign probabilities in their head and roll the dice because they don't trust straight fiat, others would favor choosing based on what is interesting, and some (probably most) would make some sort of complex choice based on several criteria with the goal of making the game 'fun' for themselves and the players (or the players and themselves).  BTW, you just described using "GM Force".OMG, I've been DMing/playing for 30 years now.  All you are showing me is that you DM pretty much like every other DM I've had.  But the above example is radically different than what is being discussed in this thread and has no bearing on it nor does it inform the discussion of it.   You had a player 'opting in' and offering an IC proposition based on engagement and experimentation.  Big freaking deal.  Of course that's easy to play back to.  You fleshed out a scenario and improvised based on unexpected player propositions.  Great.  But stop acting like this is some esoteric secret knowledge used only in certain enlightened circles.</blockquote>

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