Thursday, October 31, 2013

There is no spoon...

Some ideas I wanted to share:

Wei wu wei

My basic philosophy when DMing a game is best explained with the daoist paradox wei wu wei. Good translations for this are either "action without action" or "control without control". Any approach to involve the players in the game goes back to this idea and it's consequences. In principle it should allow players to give the game they are playing an individual touch without jeopardizing balancing factors of the game. Any approach of building a setting should produce enough moving parts to let the system respond to player decisions before I have to jump in as a DM. As soon as action is required, the result should ideally be spontaneous, not leading in a forced direction, but within the natural flow of the story and the impulses provided by the players.

For this, a system not only needs to be balanced and fully understood, but an individual expression of the DM. It's not something you can buy, it's something you make.

[further reading]

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