Recent content by Reynard

I think Micah is talking about diagetic rewards -- that is, following a characters motivations leads to rewards in the fiction, not on the character sheet.

That is one way to do it, but player motivations are their responsibility. For example, one of the PCs is the last survivor of their monastery, which was wiped out by the Usurper. That player has a list of targets, from the Usurper down to one of the privates who carried the banner during the...

Yes. I guess I should have defined "player driven" for this thread in the OP, since folks will certainly have their own definitions.

I may have been unclear. The entire setting fits the over-arching story being told -- the PCs as a revenge squad against the Usurper -- but that doesn't mean every aspect of it is crafted with them in mind. My goal was to have a adventure rich setting that made sense within the context of the...

In my con game I made sure to use adversaries that generate Fear when PCs failed reaction rolls. That helped bolster my ability to use more adversaries.

One thing I noticed running a 6 player con game of DH is that more players reduces the number of players that easily hit the 3 Hope threshold for their big class ability -- because for the same amount of fear and adversary turns, individual player go half again less often than if there are 4...

Sure. And that is where I landed. I made an event occur that galvanized the PCs to action. It worked. All is well. But I still wanted to whine about it. ;)

Would you say that applying "pressure" is the GM driving things?

Yes, and some of the players are those players, but not all. So i think there is a bit of friction in the party on that end. Plus, this is a weekly game we realistically get to play biweekly for 2.5 hours. I think some players just aren't interested in the "homework" part --which is fair.

In this case, there is no path, just an agreed upon end goal (we had a strong session 0 establishing this). Don't get me wrong, the campaign is fun and we have had some wacky adventures so far as the PCs try and build themselves up to be able to go toe to toe with the BBEG. it is just more...

You are making a bunch of assumptions that don't apply.

Ancient or modern, I think bespoke subsystems are great. Focused mechanics meant to do a specific thing to enhance play in that domain is far superior, in my mind, to forcing everything to use whatever arbitrary "core mechanic" drives combat or skill checks or whatever. Example: the journey...

I don't see the conflict. "The world is big and full of things. What do you do?" That is unrelated to either asking the players to make up setting elements, or them needing rails presented for them.

D&D had a pretty clear "intended narrative" -- go into the dungeon and find treasure, trying not to die along the way. Byt the time AD&D came around, that "intended narrative" had broadened to include building fotresses and acquiring followers. I think you are protesting a little too much at the...

I don't think it is a problem either. I like games as games. But the argument being made was that D&D's mechanics were built to emulate Conan et al, and I don't think that is true at all. The milieu was, but not the rules.