From:	Jarmo Karonen jarmo.karonen@***.fi
Subject:	Jak Koke E-Mail (Concerning the SR Novels)
Date:	Sat, 17 Jul 1999 20:31:31 +0300

Twist wrote:

>Novels that use sourcebook plot hooks intended for the GMs foil the
>adventures those GMs have made. The whole point of the sourcebooks is
to
>provide material for our games, not to replace a writer's creativity.
The
>novelists should be coming up with their own ideas. If you avoid the
novels,
>you diverge into alternate campaign universes which players don't like
>because they feel it's false and they are out of the FASA SR loop and
GMs
>don't like because they are hamstringed into rewriting history
continually
>not to mention the dreaded "That's not the way it happened" coming from
>players.

Ok, now I'm beginning (slow that I am) to see your problem. Basically
the problem is that your players know too much, and if you present
something differently than was done in some novel, you get an argument
from your players. Right?

I believe it was Bull who offered a simple solution: just clear
everything before giving it to players. If you want to do something
differently than in the novel, don't let your players read that novel.
If your players have a problem with this, then you really should
consider finding a new player group...

I haven't had this problem ever. My players simply aren't interested in
reading sourcebooks or novels, and that makes my plot altering a great
deal easier. Well honestly, of course a player, whose character is a
mage, has read rules from SRII (that's what we're still playing with)
and Grimoire, but that's about it.

>So far I've had adventures concerning the Deep Resonance, Dunk's
>assassination, the Crash of '29, the Ordo Maximus and Martin DeVries,
and the
>Corp War ruined because of the SR novels telling the stories the
sourcebooks
>set up. That's how I can say that.

Again, now I have to bring up a question that Quindrael has brought up:
don't you ever then have a problem with sourcebook telling your story?

I mean that for me there's a lot of things I want to change in
Dunkelzahn assasination (I'm thinking about putting my player characters
to kill him. They do it before they actually understand what they have
done... <EGMG>) and in other plots too.

- J. Karonen