Pretty much this. The players make the boxes, or the beard, relevant to play. Heck, even if the player asks, "Are there boxes in the alley" and the DM says yes (off the cuff, it wasn't noted before), this is only a tiny step from direct player authorship anyway.
So, you do understand the difference between player authorial control and exploration through the character. What makes these two things different (the "tiny step") and how does that difference affect gameplay?
As to my earlier posting, sorry not to get back to the thread sooner regarding the two scenarios but I've had other things occupying me. Both of those scenarios happened at game tables I was GMing, in essence. Both were games I was running for folks I (mostly) hadn't previously met and both games utilized pregens that the players could modify at the start, as well as ask general questions and clarify some background details they wanted to add to help them RP their characters. I run a lot of games at gamedays and convention with dozens of people each year who I have never GMed before as well as regular games with a regular group (usually at a gamestore).
How would any of the posters involved in this discussion handle the following situations?
Scenario one:
You're running a Forgotten Realms game (or a setting with identical facets) at a gameday or for all new players in your home or at one of the player's homes. Characters have been created and the group has moved through a town looking for something, let's say specific warm weather gear that isn't on the equipment list in the PH (like a polar bear fur coat), and they've realized they are being chased by thieves or muggers or they suspect possibly worse. They run around a corner while fleeing into an alley and one of the players says, "And in the alley there are some crates. On one of them, Elminster is sitting smoking his pipe and he recognizes me because my uncle worked for him loyally for over a dozen years before dying. I ask him to help us out of this jam." The players at the table turn to you expectantly. How do you handle this.
The first involved a convention pickup game where a young teen player asked at the start, to get his bearings, I thought, if the setting was like Forgotten Realms. He also said that he wanted his character to have come from a large family. Having run hundreds of games for strangers over 40 years, I get kinda used to curve balls and players looking for angles. As long as they do so in character, and accept any perceptual twists I have to add because they can only take in the setting through their character, then we're all more or less on the same page. What made this leap to mind was the earlier mention of crates, because this player did actual mention that Elminster was sitting on some crates.
Now, I'm not a GM who likes things to come to a screeching halt, nor likes to say "No" but since I am not actually running an FR game, just one that I had told the player was near enough that he'd be comfortable using FR as a reference, I did paint myself somewhat into a corner. Part of GMing for me is about improvisation and making sure to introduce conflict while still maintaining GM authorial control over the setting and having the players experience the environment through their characters.
So, I went with it but only as far as my own setting would allow. The guy on the crates jumped up and said, "Follow me!" Then he led them down the alley and through a door. When they all felt safe he revealed himself to be the uncle, not dead at all and disguising himself as this great wizard to avoid the very people who had been chasing the PCs (one of the major villainous factions in this particular town). The game moved forward and as the rest of the session unfolded, the uncle revealed that he had made up "Elminster" and had been using the false identity for years to right wrongs by convincing adventuring groups to go on quests. This was essentially the day that PC found out there was no Santa Claus. In this way I was able to ease the player back into RPing rather than storytelling and was very happy to see he understood the difference through the rest of the game.
Scenario two:
Similar setup but it is a Greyhawk game (or nearly identical setting for our purposes). The four players all have one character and you have started them in a tavern for whatever reason, even if you would never normally do that, when a fight breaks out. The players all agree that their characters should flee the tavern and the area. As they exit, one of the players says, "I look over and see a hovercraft. It's a four-seater like the kind I got in another Greyhawk game when exploring near the Barrier Peaks. Since this character I am playing today has a background in engineering, which I knew would come in handy, I tell everyone to jump in and I hot wire the thing so we can take off quickly." One of the other players looks over his character sheet and clears his throat. Two others look at engineer character player smiling enigmatically. The first player speaks again asking, "How fast does this one go?" How do you proceed?
This one was a bit trickier. It was an older player than myself who knew GH up and down and killed a few more minutes than I would of liked at the beginning of the slot with "I remember when my [first/second/favorite PC] did [this] and [that]" stories. There's often a bit of this early in games while players sort out their gaming pecking order. I don't really mind it as long as it isn't ongoing through the whole slot with each situation becoming a "This reminds me of . . ." session.
Now, I don't really do tech in my Grymvald setting. It's not post apoc nor does it include aliens from outer space. But, not one to jump first to saying "No" I figured someone might have something like this in the form of a modified flying carpet, which I described to the player as what the PC saw when he looked closer. It wasn't exactly what he wanted as a player but in character, he then went on to describe to the other characters how he knew of these things as pale imitations of the tech he knew. Once he owned that this was what his character was saying, I was fine. A PC can say whatever he wants. He can lie. He can be mistaken. He can be deluded. Unless that clarification needs to be part of the game because the player presses it, I leave it open to conjecture. It doesn't really change the setting for the PC to say anything at all. As it turned out, they couldn't work the flying carpet with no command word and made a dash for it when the carpet-alarms went off. I left it at that as they got on with adventuring.
