One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.
Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.
If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like
The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].
The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don’t recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.
This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
You’ve sort of reinvented Fate. In Fate, you can spend a fairly renewable resource to “Declare a story detail”. You typically need to justify what you’re trying to do with something on your character or the scene. So if your character has the property “Everything I do is to avenge my father”, it would be likely be an easy sell to the group to be like “That bandit! I saw him the night my father died!”
Fate has a lot of good ideas that are more in line with how I think people would intuitively play RPGs. I think a lot of people playing D&D and its close relatives would enjoy Fate more. D&D is by comparison extremely limited in how creative you can be, rules-as-written.
The GM in Fate is also encouraged to invoke your character’s backstory. If your character has like “Cultists want your blood” Trouble, the GM can offer you fate points to make that come up. That’s a core part of the game’s resource economy. So when you finish dealing with the bandits and settle in to the inn, the GM can be like “As you’re sipping the host’s tea, you catch him grinning at you slyly. You hear footsteps outside. For a Fate point, how about this guy is in on the cult and signaled for his friends.”
This puts a lot more narrative control in the hands of the players. Some people really like this. Extremely controlling GMs probably won’t. Players who just “want to be told a story” but aren’t watching a movie for some reason also probably won’t. But when it works, it really makes the game’s story collaborative.
By comparison, D&D feels absolutely barebones, especially for character and narrative. It’s just missing whole systems
I really enjoyed the few times we got to play with fate. It was definitely a head scratching moment for all of us, as we’d played nothing but d&d until then.
One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.
Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.
If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like
This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.
You’ve sort of reinvented Fate. In Fate, you can spend a fairly renewable resource to “Declare a story detail”. You typically need to justify what you’re trying to do with something on your character or the scene. So if your character has the property “Everything I do is to avenge my father”, it would be likely be an easy sell to the group to be like “That bandit! I saw him the night my father died!”
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/fate-points#declaring-a-story-detail
Fate has a lot of good ideas that are more in line with how I think people would intuitively play RPGs. I think a lot of people playing D&D and its close relatives would enjoy Fate more. D&D is by comparison extremely limited in how creative you can be, rules-as-written.
The GM in Fate is also encouraged to invoke your character’s backstory. If your character has like “Cultists want your blood” Trouble, the GM can offer you fate points to make that come up. That’s a core part of the game’s resource economy. So when you finish dealing with the bandits and settle in to the inn, the GM can be like “As you’re sipping the host’s tea, you catch him grinning at you slyly. You hear footsteps outside. For a Fate point, how about this guy is in on the cult and signaled for his friends.”
This puts a lot more narrative control in the hands of the players. Some people really like this. Extremely controlling GMs probably won’t. Players who just “want to be told a story” but aren’t watching a movie for some reason also probably won’t. But when it works, it really makes the game’s story collaborative.
By comparison, D&D feels absolutely barebones, especially for character and narrative. It’s just missing whole systems
I really enjoyed the few times we got to play with fate. It was definitely a head scratching moment for all of us, as we’d played nothing but d&d until then.
That was a really interesting explanation. Thanks for typing it up.
Various Powered by the Apocalypse games do include player initiated exposition