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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6117586" data-attributes="member: 6681948">Just as the pre-play backstory is a collaborative effort, so is the play itself.  That may mean that, in pre-play, I have to shelve my Goblin PC because this game will feature Goblins as prominent enemies.  Or maybe in motivates my Goblin PC to link in somehow to that Goblin enemy, moifying my concept a little, or a lot.  During play, I also have to collaborate, which doesn't mean insisting that, as there is something I look forward to, the game should immediately skip forward to that aspect, and ignore other aspects which the rest of the group is enjoying.A hundred pages in, however, I remain puzzled by the binary "enjoyment" suggested by some posters.  "I want to kill the grell, so nothing which is not about immediate combat with the grell is acceptable; I want to be in the city right now, and anything which delays me being in the city is unacceptable; I am either interacting directly with the immediate goal I have focused on or the entire game is mind-numbingly boring to the point I would rather sit at home until the game refers to my one issue of focus than play through anything else with my friends in the gaming group".  I find this "it's either nirvana of gaming or the pits of boredom" binary switch very confusing.For my part, I want the fiction to come first, rather than designing the fiction to spotlight niche choices.So, for instance, I prefer the following approach: "We're going to play a game about fighting Orcus's undead hordes" "OK, cool, guess I'm playing a cleric!" rather than "I'm playing a cleric" "OK, then I guess I'd better stick in some undead encounters."In practice (at least my practice) the causal chains are more complex, with iterations back and forth in both directions, but the first approach is still the overall direction I'm aiming at. System matters to this, too - @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=82106" target="_blank">AbdulAlhazred</a> on these boards has frequently made the point that the broad 4e skills tend to do a clearer job of framing a PC with a thematic and story orientation, which tends to mean there's less need for tailored "spotlight" encounters to permit the use of a niche skill. (4e rituals are more niche in this way, but the system makes them very cheap as a resource, so it's not that purging for a player to be able to pop out a given ritual only occasionally when the fiction calls for it.)</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

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