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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6118790" data-attributes="member: 42582">You are presenting this from an ingame perspective. And of course, ingame, sieges (and many other things) don't take place unless someone (often an NPC) has a goal.But I'm talking about the metagame perspective. From the metagame perspective, the siege exists because it will be fun for the players. Because a siege needs soldiers, and leaders, some NPCs are now introduced into the fiction (or some old NPCs repurposed) to have the requisite goals. So the GM, in running the game, did not reason "NPCs, with goals, therefore siege"; rather, s/he reasoned "Need siege, therefore there are these NPCs with these goals to drive it."This is a pretty longstanding GM technique - for instance, how many classic D&D GMs have reasoned, "I need a dungeon for the players (and their PCs) to explore; and it has to have lots of whacky stuff in it. I wonder who built it? I know, a crazy wizard!"? This is perhaps the most traditional example in which an NPC and the NPC's goals are created purely to serve a metagame purpose, rather than already existing as elements of the fiction and being used to generate new fictional elements by verisimilitudinous infererence.The utlimate statement of this metagame attitude towards NPCs that I'm aware of is <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">this</a>, from Paul Czege:[W]hen I'm framing scenes . . . I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.This method is just like the GM who invents a crazy wizard to be the dungeon builder, except bringing the same technique to bear on a much more moment-by-moment level within the game - not just for dungeon design, but for establishing the flow of events from moment to moment within the adjudication of the game. NPCs and their goals are introduced into the fiction intentionally, to push and pull the players in interesting ways (like giving them a siege to engage with); the fiction is not extrapolated from pregiven NPCs and their pregiven goals.Whereas I'm pretty sure it's that latter thing - treating NPCs and their goals as established elements of the fiction, and then extrapolating to new fictional occurences via "objective" inferences from those NPCs' known goals and opportunities - that   [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] means in saying that "I like the idea that NPC's also have goals, and that PC's are not clearly labelled as such, marked for treatment different than the common herd." And that would be utterly consistent with all the other preferences N'raac has expressed in this thread, which on every point where it's come up incline strongly towards simulationist play preferences.</blockquote>

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