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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6672968" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Not really. Because if the DM inserts elements in the moment, you are no longer dealing with discovering a shared world--you are discovering what's going on in the DMs head.1e & 2e had about the right degree of random tables for me.One end of the spectrum:The DM comes to the table with no world, no story, no statblocks.One player says, "So my character is from a farm.  Where do we..."DM: The mud of the trail that you leave unconcernedly on your shoes as you enter the Hall of Lords contrasts with the emaculate dress of Lady Howenot, who turns and looks upon your character with disdain.Player: Why am I here?DM: That's for you to decide.Player: "Fair lady, I'm searching for the Riddle of Mentios, perhaps you have heard of it?"DM: "Are you from Mentios then? I had not thought a peasant from the land of milk cows and beans would have traveled so far only to muddy the elven-made floors of this hall."Player: "Yay, I have traveled far in search of the Riddle, to save the kingdom of Vangard, for I am the lost heir to its Emerald Crown."DM: "Interesting. Perhaps I will help you, for a time."In this version, everything was made up on the fly by the player and DM. Sort of that "yes, and" thing taken to a world-building extreme. This may or may not be about a story. The defining element is that world-features are defined by player/DM declaration on the spot, in response to what is happening at the time, to accomplish specific ends of the players/DMs. They aren't exploring a world, they are creating it.The other end of the spectrum:The DM is playing in his version of the the Forgotten Realms. He's made a few general changes, and filled in some details that published material doesn't include. He also has a robust set of random tables to roll on.DM: You sit in the pleasant, if rather bare, dining room of the Shining Serpent Inn in the city of Neverwinter. The delightful aroma of baking bread makes your mouth water, while the warm, fluffy guest robe that you wear, gives you a feeling of relaxing at home. As you wait for your breakfast, the simple comfort of the morning distracts your mind from the purpose of your visit--investigating rumors of smugglers based out of the Inn."Player: Is there anything special about this robe? Since the robe feels warm, does that mean that it's winter?"DM: Other than the embroidered depiction of a silver serpent, marking the robe as inn property, nothing stands out as unusual about it. It is mid-Autumn rather than winter."Player: I'll wait for my breakfast. Who else is in the room?DM: [Rolls on table] A dwarf, and 3 human travelers sit at tables in the room. The waitress arrives with warm bread and the inn's signature eel pie. "5 gold pieces. Is there anything else I can get for you?"Player: "No, that will do for now. I did have a question..."Here the DM is taking everything straight out of Volo's Guide to the North, pages 140-142. That's what the inn is like, and the player gets to explore it in the moment, while the DM began exploring it when he read up on it before hand. The other patrons in the room were determined by a random roll on an appropriate table (not found in Volo's Guide, if anyone is following along at home). The random roll means that player and DM alike get to discover who is in the room, allowing the DM's exploration of the world to continue. If the player continues his investigation, he might interact with smugglers that the DM created (either ahead of time or by random rolls).The difference is that in the first one the world doesn't exist until the player and DM create it. In the second case, all the creating of the world has already been done. Because the DM isn't a supercomputer who can design every bystander and candlestick ahead of time, he relies on random rolls to fill in that information. Random rolls mimic interacting with a third entity, neither player nor DM, and which in context of the game is the world. The creation of the random tables is part of the creation of the world that is undertaken before the game begins. Even had the DM whipped up a random "table" on the spot, assuming he made it appropriate to the world, rather than to a story idea in his head, it would still be representative of the third entity, rather than of particular story goals of the DM.The key element is that with exploration, you are discovering and interacting with a third entity--the world. You and DM visit the world. With creation, you are interacting with the DM's response to your own immediate choices. You visit the DM's creative thoughts.Now, most of the time no one is going to play at either extreme. On the first end of the specture, generally you have some idea of what story you want to tell, and probably have at least conceptually established who some NPCs are and what events or locations may be relevant. In the second type of game, you might give the waitress a personality that isn't rolled on a table, and decide that at one of the tables sits a bard from a significant bardic school that you plan to have an ongoing presence in the campaign. But the important distinction remains.I'm not sure how to express it any more clearly. I'm not a music afficionado. If someone introduces me to the differences between a couple of subgenres of a particular type of music, which I can understand and discern, and then expresses how this is such a big deal, I'm likely to not appreciate the difference. It just doesn't seem to really be a meaningful thing to me. It's simply a matter of appreciation. I can however, understand that, based on the number of these crazy music nit-pickers, there is something there.So that's what I'm saying. There is something there. There are plenty of us who feel that it matters. There's nothing wrong with not appreciating that difference, but it's kind of annoying to us to be told that it doesn't matter, when it clearly does.Some specific points:A premade story is part of the world, so it is explored during play.One might say such a table isn't a very good one. Or you might say that it is a pre-established element of the world that exciting dangers are going to be there for the PCs.You don't roll for that stuff because the level of detail is too fine for most of us. We want to explore aspects of the world that relevant to our adventurous tales. Occasionally a DM might decide to randomly roll for such a thing. If the random roll is likely enough that occasionally do it makes the world feel realistic, it is still in harmony with exploration. If the random roll is a very slim chance, such that it would only feel right if you rolled it regularly rather than occasionally, then it's somewhat out of harmony.For the doors, in the strictest form of exploration, you would roll randomly if it weren't pregenerated and there wasn't any obvious choice based on what had been pre-established.It's simply a matter of what the experience is. In particular (though I skipped the portion of this thread that dealt with the religious icon knowledge check, so I might be missing background), if the random roll determines that the player doesn't know the significance of the item, they might want to try to find out the significance. This allows them to explore and interact with the world in a different way than if they had simply had it handed to them--which would be interacting with a DM motivation rather than with the world as a third entity.Now, in practice I don't hold to the strict extreme I described. One of things the I enjoy most about DMing is spontaneous acting and filling in details. But I try to mimic as much of it as I can by making sure content I create on the fly is informed primarily by the world--what makes sense in the setting--rather than by a story--what makes sense for my DM story-goals.Take an actual example from my game. I was running Lost Mine of Phandelver. The party didn't feel right about attacking the Spectator in the dungeon, since it didn't attack them. They struck up a conversation with it, and I created a name for it, and when the players questioned it, I created a name for the Spectator race. (Since I was running this game in a separate continuity than my own world, I explicitly told the players that this name for the race might not carry over to my normal version of the multiverse.) The players had some interesting role-playing, during which I had to create some backstory for the Spectator. All of it was created to logically fit the lore given for Spectators in the MM, and the backstory of the mine in the adventure--none of it was created based on what I thought would lead a story in a certain direction.Because this didn't give them an easy way to resolve the dilemma (and after fruitlessly asking people in Phandelver), they went to the nearest place they knew where information might be found: Neverwinter.In preparation, I spent a bit of time scanning info about it. They actually stayed at that inn mentioned, and I did describe it a bit (though not to that detail), referencing Volo's Guide. One of the players was playing a priest of Kelemvor, and we had established (created) before the game began that there was a temple of Kelemvor in Neverwinter. There was player-DM backstory collaboration on that, and because it assisted in his backstory (that's why he was in Neverwinter at the start of the adventure), I allowed the player input. That's all pre-game collaboration, and I have no problem with that. Had that not been decided before the game began, I would have probably rolled randomly, or made a judgment based on what I know about Neverwinter and what I know about temples of Kelemvor, as to whether or not there was such a temple there--rather than based on whether it would help or hinder the story.I created a personality for the priest at the temple on the fly. Since he didn't happen to know the answer to their questions, and wasn't of high enough level to provide the needed spells (knowledge roll for priest, world-consistent decision on his level). He recommended visiting the temple of Tymora, where a higher level priest may be found. They did so. I created the architecture of the temple, the personality and name of the priest, and a variety of details entirely on the fly, informed by the details already established about the world. The priest was able to help them out somewhat. He traveled to Phandelver with them, where he knew the acolyte of Tymora at the shrine (since that made the most sense in-world).Due to the way things worked out, the players ended up convincing the Spectator (I can't recall if they cast a spell to cure his insanity or not) that his contract was over and he didn't need to be there, and he then left, allowing them to plunder the building of its treasure.Now, during the course of the adventure, there were two things that I did that weren't consistent with my general described DMing style. The first was to say that the drow found a silver dagger and a few copper when she searched a room full of skeletal corpses, without rolling. The adventure said nothing about treasure in the room, and I wanted to reward her for searching. I'm still not entirely satisfied that I did that. The other one was assuming that Traveler Petros (the priest of Tymora) was also associated with the Harpers and knew about the acolyte's mission regarding Agatha and the spellbook. That one I'm happier about, because it was a quite likely detail based on what had been pre-established (including, at this point, the existence and personality of the priest), and it served a meta-game purpose (encouraging the party to pursue side-quests) that I liked.As I said, I'm not 100% on the strictest end of the scale, but hopefully that will demonstrate the feel of what I'm doing and the sort of experience it supplies the players, and the role/desirability of the two instances in that long sequence of exploration where I did not follow my general rule.TL;DR Exploration where the players interact with pre-established elements of the world as a third entity (including appropriate random tables to fill in details) and in the moment content creation is primarily to fill in fine details (not the same as pre-established material for the purpose of a fair challenge), is a significantly different experience than one in which the world is created by DM and/or players on the fly to fulfill story desires. Neither experience is inferior, but the exploration style has an inherent appeal derived from allowing and respecting the world's consistent existence as a distinct entity from the DM's spontaneous world creation.</blockquote>

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