I did have it mind that the plane would crash (IIRC, the players failed a Procedural Check where they were fighting with the ghosts and trying to save the plane - but even if they hadn't I probably would have found a way to crash the plane - to me, this was an example of the "obvious thing that has to happen" I talk about on the podcast). But a lot of other events were totally the players' ideas and decision: Cole killing California, Shannon getting pregnant, the band deciding to flee the media circus and go back to the Holler, writing a magic rock opera to bind Saturday, even Rae dying of AIDS.
Looking at that list, those are all "pivotal" but not necessarily "external" events. I guess we did observe a fairly typical players run their characters / GM runs the world split. The players would not have taken it upon themselves to narrate a tornado, for instance. But I was being more reactive as GM than I am in most games. There was less "external world" stuff coming at them than there would be in a lot of games I've run. Contra the DS rules, I would often start a session with an establishing scene that set up the location and some situation, but after that we followed the rules about taking turns calling for scenes, and I did a lot of sitting back letting the players talk to each other.
We had issues with some aspects of DramaSystem - primarily the odds in procedural conflicts and some discomfort around "forcing" in dramatic conflict - but we all loved character generation and the emergent inter-character play that came out of that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-07-05 03:07 pm (UTC)And that's a good question.
I did have it mind that the plane would crash (IIRC, the players failed a Procedural Check where they were fighting with the ghosts and trying to save the plane - but even if they hadn't I probably would have found a way to crash the plane - to me, this was an example of the "obvious thing that has to happen" I talk about on the podcast). But a lot of other events were totally the players' ideas and decision: Cole killing California, Shannon getting pregnant, the band deciding to flee the media circus and go back to the Holler, writing a magic rock opera to bind Saturday, even Rae dying of AIDS.
Looking at that list, those are all "pivotal" but not necessarily "external" events. I guess we did observe a fairly typical players run their characters / GM runs the world split. The players would not have taken it upon themselves to narrate a tornado, for instance. But I was being more reactive as GM than I am in most games. There was less "external world" stuff coming at them than there would be in a lot of games I've run. Contra the DS rules, I would often start a session with an establishing scene that set up the location and some situation, but after that we followed the rules about taking turns calling for scenes, and I did a lot of sitting back letting the players talk to each other.
We had issues with some aspects of DramaSystem - primarily the odds in procedural conflicts and some discomfort around "forcing" in dramatic conflict - but we all loved character generation and the emergent inter-character play that came out of that.