Quote from: chirine ba kal;932971Oh, for crissakes. Just shoot me now, and put me out of my misery. Harchar would have just thrown himself over the side at this.

It does kind of want to make you drown your sorrows in torpedo juice, doesn't it.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;932971Oh, for crissakes. Just shoot me now, and put me out of my misery. Harchar would have just thrown himself over the side at this.

On the other hand, there have always been a lot of people who seem to either be unable to reach a logical conclusion, or to put 2 and 2 together.  Remember the Imperial Stormtroopers and "do not take carts past this point?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;932992On the other hand, there have always been a lot of people who seem to either be unable to reach a logical conclusion, or to put 2 and 2 together.  Remember the Imperial Stormtroopers and "do not take carts past this point?

Yes, but those are tropes. You're saying that a perfectly healthy young person can look at a map of some mythic land and not come up with possible adventures. This explain a lot of what I've been seeing over the past decade, in gaming.

Amazing; simply amazing. But then, I'n an old codger who can look at a miniature figure or a model and spin an entire adventure off of it on the spot. I buy and build things because they give me ideas - EPT, when I first picked it up off the shelf in the Little Tin back in 1975, positively reeked of opportunity for adventures...

Havre a look at the Dark Fable or Bronze Age miniatures sites. Any ideas pop into your head?

Quote from: chirine ba kal;933123Yes, but those are tropes. You're saying that a perfectly healthy young person can look at a map of some mythic land and not come up with possible adventures. This explain a lot of what I've been seeing over the past decade, in gaming.

Amazing; simply amazing. But then, I'n an old codger who can look at a miniature figure or a model and spin an entire adventure off of it on the spot. I buy and build things because they give me ideas - EPT, when I first picked it up off the shelf in the Little Tin back in 1975, positively reeked of opportunity for adventures...

Havre a look at the Dark Fable or Bronze Age miniatures sites. Any ideas pop into your head?

Uncle, I strongly suspect that the problem Gronan solved was explaining to him that he is allowed to find adventures without the GM explicitly pointing them to him, and thus getting the wheels in his head turning again;).

(I've lost track of the times I've seen people giving the advice to GMs that "if the players want to join the navy and not bother with your adventure, nothing happens until they get back on track". And I'm starting to lose track of the people who told me on forums that "being able to come up with adventures from an off-the-cuff decision of the players is a special skills not all GMs possess"!)

Quote from: AsenRG;933124I think the problem Gronan solved was explaining to him that he is allowed to have adventures without the GM explicitly pointing them to him, Uncle;).

Dear God. And here, for all these years, I thought that that was the way to play. The GM created a world, and we fooled around in it.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;933125Dear God. And here, for all these years, I thought that that was the way to play. The GM created a world, and we fooled around in it.

It is the way to play if you ask me:). And I haven't had a player trying it for any significant length of time and returning to "scripted stories"... Granted, some people told me they don't want to play, because they want their stories to be scripted. (And I gave them the e-mails of GMs that run those).

But the key was in the "being allowed" part. If the guy had only played with GMs that didn't allow deviating from the "adventure at hand", are you surprised he might need some prompting to unlearn the lesson?

Remember, in many people's games if you join the navy while on the quest to Retrieve The Golden Bra Of Perkiness, which is presumably the adventure the GM bought* and read, and decide to ditch his adventure? Well, suddenly nothing happens in the navy. There's no need of a navy at that point in time. No naval wars going on, nobody is jockeying for a promotion, and the pirates are conspicuously absent...
Until you decide to leave the navy and board a ship in search of The Golden Bra Of Perkiness, that is;). Then pirates appear! They're in the module, after all. And the module says "when you try to reach the islands to search for clues, pirates appear". Obviously they wouldn't appear before that:p!

And I was told last month, on this forum, that "being able to come up with a storyline for the authorities investigating the PCs killing locals after being attacked by said locals, is a special skill not many GMs possess (and something many wouldn't bother with)". Because the adventure, as planned, doesn't involve a courtroom.

At the same time, the number of "my players are deviating from my plot, what do I do" threads is...too big to count.

So yeah. After playing in this style, even I'd probably need some reminding that yes, if my pirate PC sees the Pasha's daughter on her window, he is allowed to decide to climb the wall to her window next night in order to court her.
It seems to me, from Gronan's account, that he'd merely provided that reminder. Why? Because he said it was a revelation to the guy.
If he was truly hopeless, no amount of advice would have helped;).


*With apologies to Gronan for taking his example of "adventure hook" and turning it into a module. It was for the sake of the example, Glorious General:D!

Quote from: chirine ba kal;933125Dear God. And here, for all these years, I thought that that was the way to play. The GM created a world, and we fooled around in it.

That is the way the vast majority of my players have always played. My current crew of kids at the public library are now doing the same. They are off to the big city to auction an owl-bear head and find an old school mega-dungeon crawl beneath the city to adventure in.  There is hope for the younger generation yet!

Quote from: AsenRG;933127And I was told last month, on this forum, that "being able to come up with a storyline for the authorities investigating the PCs killing locals after being attacked by said locals, is a special skill not many GMs possess (and something many wouldn't bother with)". Because the adventure, as planned, doesn't involve a courtroom.

Eh? Where?

Quote from: CRKrueger;933130Eh? Where?

You were in that thread, are you kidding me or what?

It is much easier to ad-lib on the fly for rules-light RPGs than adjudicate and create out of thin air for medium to high crunch games where players have mechanical and rules-as-written expectations. I have (some) sympathy for GMs of 3x and those whose RPG experience is mostly Living Campaigns where the default play is to follow the 4 hour module from step-to-step without deviance, because its much more burdensome to whip stuff up for those players in those systems.

I imagine EPT via OD&D would be very easy for ad-libbing once someone got the setting under their belt. Once you're fully immersed, its far easier to jump off the preplanned pages. Especially since OD&D is a rules-barely-there system.

It's why I love Mazes & Minotaurs. It's faux-Mythic Greece via Harryhausen and I've got enough Greek myth expertise to keep up immersion and adventure in whichever direction the players want to go, and I'm supported by the rules-light system of M&M.

And now I shall pimpeth M&M most heartily...the greatest free RPG of 1972!!
http://storygame.free.fr/OLDMAZES.htm

Quote from: Spinachcat;933136It is much easier to ad-lib on the fly for rules-light RPGs than adjudicate and create out of thin air for medium to high crunch games where players have mechanical and rules-as-written expectations.

Having used ad-libbing for running GURPS 3e, GURPS 4e, Exalted 2, Exalted 3, Legends of the Wulin and Fates Worse than Death, I'd like to state that it's still quite possible;).

Ha! weak sauce, I've ad-libbed scenes in Chivalry and Sorcery.

When EPT was originally released there was not the flood of pre-written adventures and modules like came after.
All there was to go on was your imagination and nobody knowing any better.
If you wanted to play new characters in a strange land, like John Cater of Mars instead of pseudo-Europe, it was a great choice.

I don't remember as much Rules Lawyering then either. Fewer people knew the rules to start with.
=

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;933163Ha! weak sauce, I've ad-libbed scenes in Chivalry and Sorcery.

I'd bow to your superior rules mastery, if I were to bow to anyone:D!

Quote from: AsenRG;933134You were in that thread, are you kidding me or what?

Hmm.  Grove doubted you would have a schedule and timetable for an NPC gang's operations, arrest, conviction, and sentencing whether or not the PCs ever interacted with them.  That is not "being able to come up with a storyline for the authorities investigating the PCs killing locals after being attacked by said locals".  That's not even remotely close to the same thing.

Neither is playing chess without a board, remembering all setting details set up on the fly without writing them down, picking the winner of a fight by their entry walk, or any of the other minor superpowers you claim , that people keep saying don't apply to everybody.