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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6120447" data-attributes="member: 42582">From my point of view, there is this difference:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">With the siege, the fiction is already established at the table. And the players can declare actions which draw on that fiction - eg When the next bombardment commences we take advantage of the confusion to enter the city. The players are directly able to build on the established fiction, moving the fiction forward and changing the situation via the play of their PCs. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">With the commercial mystery you describe, the players can't declare actions for their PCs that change the situation until they get the GM to establish more of the fiction at the table. That investigative aspect of the situation you describe is what Hussar has called "following the GM's trail of breacrumbs" - less pejoratively, it's a type of play in which the players' play of their PCs doesn't change the ingame situation - it doesn't introduce new dramatic stakes, or resolve existing conflicts. It simply triggers the GM's narration of additional bits of fiction. Once the players learn about the teleportation circle in the merchants' guildhouse, the dynamic of play becomes the same as the siege. But the period leading up to that reveal is very different.</li> </ul>I think the difference between these two episodes of play is pretty big. It reflects the reasons why Ron Edwards says that Call of Cthulhu is not a game that is about player agency. (Which is not to say that CoC is not a good game; but for instance I would never want to GM it, and wouldn't want to play it as a campaign game - I enjoy CoC as a one-off in which I am enterained by the GM's narration and contribute my own overwrought characterisation of my PC.)Who said that? [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] seems pretty scathing of Maure Castle (and having had a pretty bad time GMing WG5 when it came out, I tend to agree). I introduced it only as an illustration of how far back in RPGing one can find the idea of introducing an NPC and giving him/her motivations because that serves a metagame purpose, rather than being a derivation of ingame logic.Why would you think this is an exception? If the players had expressed a desire to learn where the phylactery is hidden, or to reengage with the lich - eg by casting Consult Mystic Sages - then I would have had to work out what happened.And I can tell you that the phylactery would not have been lying unwarded in a field of buttercups. But nor would it have been protected by a bunch of traps and monsters that bore no connection to the lich or the phylactery other than being procedural obstacles to getting to it. I would have had to come up with a couple of intervening encounters, between players and phylactery, that both reinforced the sense that this is a lich's phylactery we're talking about - it's guarded - but that also spoke to the place of the lich in the fiction and drama of the game - so that they weren't just roadblocks, but engaging situations in their own right.Kas has backstory that's known at the table. That's the point of using him, or Vecna, or other "iconic" cosmological story elements. So of course things can't happen that contradict that established backstory.But that doesn't make the idea of "keeping NPC personalities unfixed, so they can be used to apply pressure", irrelevant. Suppose that the PCs had made the suggestion to join with Vecna, how would Kas respond? I don't know what the answer to that is, but in play I would have it be in some way that keeps the situation moving forward to some sort of dramatic resolution. In the actual scenario I described upthread, the PCs refused to hand over the niece to Kas, now matter how much he insisted. There are a range of ways that Kas might respond to that. The way I decided was interesting was to use this to reflect the players' playing of their PCs back at them: so Kas said words to the effect of, You can keep the niece if you swear to help me find the grandmother; and I want you to make that oath in whatever terms you made the oath to take the niece back to her uncle, because I want you to keep your promise to me as firmly as you are insisting on keeping your promise about the niece!No doubt other interesting stuff could have been done too, but that's what I thought of and ran with.</blockquote>

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