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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9514589" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't generally do what you describe - ask the players to tell me things about stuff that's not their PCs - in any of the RPGs that I GM.But from time to time the players make assertions about things that their PCs are experiencing or remembering, and those things get incorporated into the shared fiction.And sometimes it's a bit more abstract than that, in a sense I'll try and explain via the following example: in the late 80s I was GMing an AD&D game where the two PCs were a duergar fighter/thief and a svirfneblin illusionist/thief. We started in the Keep of B2 fame. I don't even recall whether our play got to the Caves - I suspect not, given my lack of memory. But the players got up to various hijinks in the Keep, and discovered the evil priest and his cult, and this cult plot then was followed by them to Critwall (I had set the Keep in Greyhawk's Shield Lands), where (as I recall) it turned out the mayor's wife was a member of the cult.The actions that the players declared for their PCs started from a premise that thiefly hijinks were feasible - that is, that not every strongbox was guarded by an impossible lock and a glyph of warding; that not every door was guarded 24/7; etc. Those are not concrete details of setting elements, but rather an orientation towards, or assumption about, the setting that is implicit in, and very important to, the players' declarations of actions for their PCs. And as the GM, I followed their lead.AD&D is not the robust ruleset for this sort of thing, because there are times when it would be nice to have rules for making checks, and establishing consequences, that AD&D doesn't have. So these days I would never go back to it, given that I have Burning Wheel and Torchbearer and other games whose rules are more robust.But nothing about AD&D makes the sort of gaming we did with it impossible - I mean, if it was impossible we wouldn't have been able to do it! In fact it's pretty straightforward. Me and my friend were hardly supra-geniuses of RPGing!</blockquote>

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