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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6101905" data-attributes="member: 4937">Even the advice in BW is not so unnuanced, and as you've already shown us from your example of play, in practice you do nothing so one diminsional but instead make all the sorts of complex calculations that any good GM does.  So why are insisting on a rigid inflexible technique that you in practice don't use?No we don't.  We both agree that we should be laying out a world that the players will find entertaining.  You just seem to have players that don't find MacGuffins and BBEGs entertaining, or else, perhaps you don't exactly mean what it sounds like you mean here.   I'll try to ignore the whiff of RP snobbery coming from your post, but my last session went 4 hours of almost pure RP, no combat to speak of, and lots of character thematic development.  I very much doubt we have different views on what counts as worthwhile RPGing.I can't think of a single RPG that forces a player to choose between mechanical effectiveness and "playing their character".   Often playing your character forces you to choose between ruthless self-interest and making sacrifices based on what your character believes in, but that is not a choice for or against mechanical ineffectiveness.   Mechanically, you can tweak your character however you like to maximize their effectiveness and not have that impact your capacity to play out a set of beliefs.   Moreover, I have a character motivated by the desire to find and confront his lost father, another that believes his father is motivated to find and confront (and probably kill) him, another that has a god regularly trying to kill her and who (by player choice) doesn't yet realize just how thematicly tied she is to the campaign, and another whose background means that confronting the most obvious villains means betraying them.  Plus I have a character that is basically a 900 year old child beserker with a bloodthirsty sword.  At this point a significant percentage of the BBEG's in the environment were created by player agency.  So we have lots of sins of the fathers visited on the children issues.  And we have an over arcing unite the party type theme/goal that revolves around addressing questions like, "Do the ends justify the means?" and "Who gets to determine who the bad guys and the good guys are anyway?" that is really beginning to get pogninant and pointed.   Nobody is complaining about the themes getting explored, but if I was just DMing for 1 player instead of 6 we'd probably forgo having any BBEG's of the DM's province and focus solely on a particular player's interests.  The main purpose of the overall plot is to ensure several things of mutual utility: a) the players don't feel like its a rowboat world but there is always some thing important to accomplish and turn their attention to when they want to, b) the players have unified goals that address their motivations as a whole rather than just individual concerns, and c) those players which have little interest in exploration of character or moral philosophy and have incompatible agendas aren't forced into melodrama as the standard way to engage the game.   They can watch and laugh while other players with more interest in such things navigate those waters, and throw their weight into the fray if things turn violent.   There is nothing really wrong with playing a character with simple beliefs like, "I will survive" and "I will become powerful, to survive" and "I will become rich, to survive."  I've got room at the table for people who don't want to even think about it that much, and others who spend hours agonizing over moral choices and everything in between.Still working on a longer post.</blockquote>

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