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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9509046" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The problem with this aphorism is that it leaves out a word: good limitations breed creativity. Many limitations are bad. For example, it is a limitation to force a person to paint a picture while blindfolded with both hands tied behind their back. Clearly, since this is a significant limitation, your creativity automatically must be through the roof if you do this, thus the final product will be absolutely amazing! ...or not. Y'know, because most people can't paint worth a damn when they can only hold the brushes with their mouths and they can't even see the canvas.Point being, limitations come in both good and bad too. Good limitations cut off dull, boring, obvious pathways, forcing people to show creativity in order to participate. I recently answered a question on ELI5 about "Rayo's number," which holds the current record for the largest construction concept for a number. It came from a "duel" between mathematicians who were tasked to describe bigger numbers than the opponent. It came with two absolutely necessary limitations: every number had to be actually finite, and you couldn't just trivially modify the opponent's previous number. Each new "move" had to be doing something truly, conceptually new. Without those limitations, all of the moves could have been trivially boring, and the contest would have been a dud. Conversely, if the limitations had required that every number be one that the contestants could actually write in digits, the contest would also be trivial and boring, because compared to the infinite universe of integers, the numbers humans can actually write down personally are (almost literally) nothing.Maybe, maybe not. Note that in many cases this is not the only limitation in question. And, as I have explicitly said already, it can be useful.Is spell creation an official, default rule in the system in question? If it is, I should think a player playing any class officially permitted to use those rules would be rightfully annoyed to suddenly find out that that official, default rule had been taken away. To the best of my knowledge, most systems that have "spell lists" (may don't) this is already the official, default rule. It would be a change away from the rules as written to receive the ability to acquire existing but off-list spells, e.g. a Wizard learning signature Cleric spells or a Psion learning signature Artificer spells. A player might really want that and might be very disappointed if they couldn't get it, but they would have no room to argue that it "should" be that way by default--the default rules explicitly don't support it.Do you think the only way for there to be a world to explore is if the DM has already nailed down all of it in advance? Because this is very much not true in many games, both in terms of "game systems" and in terms of "game tables."Dungeon World has a wonderful concept here: "Draw maps, leave blanks." What this means is, you absolutely should have a map of the Kingdom of Tabletopia and perhaps even for its neighbors like the Duchy of Axygg and the Freehold of Grognardia etc., but you shouldn't nail down every single village and town, every single river and forest, every single dungeon, etc. You do enough work that people can understand the setting and the concept, so the group has something to sink their teeth into, but not so much that there's nothing for you, the DM, to discover as play progresses. As part of this, it is valid (under particular circumstances, not just willy-nilly) for the players to sometimes be the agents of discovery, who tell the group that a particular location is somewhere. It isn't that they are "retconning" or "rewriting" the setting. They are filling in the blanks on the map--places that weren't important enough for the party to know about before, but which they have learned about because it now is important to know what's there, just as you would if you were making your own map of a real place as you travelled through it (though, of course, with the addition of being a creative contributor, not merely an observer.)It really isn't absurd at all. To assume so is to make the argument circular; you are presuming that the DM can do no wrong on this front, which is simply not true.Hmm. I could potentially be in for that, at least as a..."medium-run" game. I'm not really that interested in dwarves, but I could see being one of the dwarven visionary types who is dead certain there's something "stoneward" (as opposed to "magmaward", since I don't know if these peoples would view it as "up" vs "down" per se.) Once the surface is reached, though, I'd probably want to either retire the character (as their lifelong goal has been reached and they'd be more interested in cataloguing the surface rather than adventuring in it per se) in order to play a surface-dweller, or move on to a whole new campaign set on that surface where the whole point is the group discovering what's up there together.</blockquote>

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