LogFAQs > #905358567

shadowsword87 posted...

and Caleb Stoke's Red Markets game is everyone literally building the home base of the players.

I think you can allow players to build their home base without that translating into greater input on the world or the narrative as a whole - even Critical Role had the PCs build their own base (called Grayskull Keep, and looking suspiciously like a certain castle from a certain 80s cartoon), populate it with their own host of NPC support staff that they went through an interview process to hire, and with a deliberately laid out floorplan where all of the PCs suggested rooms or areas they wanted to see added to the layout (though, of course, he did have it get partially destroyed by a large white dragon, and they rarely ever actually spent TIME there, as they were usually either on the road, or later, based out of another city because the one their keep was near was conquered by an ancient red dragon before they managed to slay it).

Even in a setting where I had almost total control over the landscape and various locations, if a player said they wanted to locate a certain type of area and set up their own stronghold/base of operations there, I'd happily let them map the whole thing out and establish lines of support and/or trade to other locales (and I probably wouldn't destroy it as a plot hook later on, either - I tend to like the idea of players being able to have a central hub to store loot and trophies without having to worry about it being gone when they get back).

(As an aside, I'm reminded of the narrative of the Lone Wolf gamebooks, where you start as a trainee in a monastery that is destroyed before the story begins, leaving you the last survivor of your brotherhood, but over the course of future books you slowly rebuild both the monastery itself and the order you were trained by in the background while going on other adventures - which is something I've considered using as a narrative hook in an RPG before, and which would allow players to either abandon or rebuild their ruined base as time goes on and they gather resources to do so.)

I wouldn't even be entirely adverse to a game where the entire gameplay arc is basically "build a fort/town/city/empire of your own", where all of the focus is on resource gathering/management, architectural planning, and diplomacy (which is sort of how the Birthright D&D setting works), if that's what the players wanted and it evolved organically out of play (hence my previous comment about being cool with the idea if players wanted to retire somewhere around level 2 and open an inn near a dungeon or something, which is based on a real RP group that apparently did just that, as per one of the stories that drift around the Internet from time-to-time). I'd probably be oddly cool with that (though I can also understand why many DMs might find it boring as hell). But the actions of the PCs would still provoke reactions from NPCs in the world, and things wouldn't always go the way they want them to. And maybe that mine they start carving out in the nearby mountain to acquire necessary resources turns out to break into ancient dwarf tunnels and ruins that lead to potential dangers...

My GMing style is usually to dangle a bunch of potential plot hooks, see which ones the players latch on to, and then develop those so that the players are interacting with the stories they WANT to, and not just getting railroaded into whatever story I wanted to tell (and obviously, playing off elements of each character's backstory, because they ARE the main characters of the narrative). But that's not the same as asking them in advance what they want and then trying to build the entire world around their ideas. Things like kingdoms, backstory, history, and NPCs are still going to be things I plot out regardless of what the players want to add to the game.


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