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"I have to admit, though, that my main goal [in having RPG players provide cards with character-centric plot hooks] is to make integrating player-driven plots easier. I'm lazy, and I don't like trying to juggle a dozen different threads outside of the game."
I quote this from sheer cognitive dissonance. I know gamemasters have different styles, but it still sometimes gobsmacks me to see such tangible evidence that the way I look at gaming is a distant, foreign land to some people - and that they way they approach it is alien to me.
My basic intuition inclines me to player-driven plots. When I feel lazy, nothing makes an easier adventure than throwing a random obstacle between a PC and what he or she wants. The PC will then write his or her own adventure in their attempts to circumvent the obstacle. In fact, I have run whole campaigns based around putting obstacles of different sizes between the PCs and what they want. They have been my most successful ones, generally.
This idea of having some random adventure and then trying to motivate the PCs to involve themselves in it? Too hard! But clearly, there are people for whom this is the easy option. And neither way is right or wrong, as long as everyone's having fun... it's just interesting for me to see the different ways that GMs approach their task. With no "GM School" to speak of, we each invent our own ways of doing it.
The dozens of different threads... all right, that can get tangly. I see it as an attraction, though. A game world doesn't feel alive and vibrant to me unless the characters in are responding to each other's actions - and I mean the NPCs as well as the PCs. If the rest of the world stops while the PCs are elsewhere, it doesn't seem right. It is work, but I find it to be enjoyable work, and it occupies my brain on the commute.
-mearls, in a comment in
I quote this from sheer cognitive dissonance. I know gamemasters have different styles, but it still sometimes gobsmacks me to see such tangible evidence that the way I look at gaming is a distant, foreign land to some people - and that they way they approach it is alien to me.
My basic intuition inclines me to player-driven plots. When I feel lazy, nothing makes an easier adventure than throwing a random obstacle between a PC and what he or she wants. The PC will then write his or her own adventure in their attempts to circumvent the obstacle. In fact, I have run whole campaigns based around putting obstacles of different sizes between the PCs and what they want. They have been my most successful ones, generally.
This idea of having some random adventure and then trying to motivate the PCs to involve themselves in it? Too hard! But clearly, there are people for whom this is the easy option. And neither way is right or wrong, as long as everyone's having fun... it's just interesting for me to see the different ways that GMs approach their task. With no "GM School" to speak of, we each invent our own ways of doing it.
The dozens of different threads... all right, that can get tangly. I see it as an attraction, though. A game world doesn't feel alive and vibrant to me unless the characters in are responding to each other's actions - and I mean the NPCs as well as the PCs. If the rest of the world stops while the PCs are elsewhere, it doesn't seem right. It is work, but I find it to be enjoyable work, and it occupies my brain on the commute.
