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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8137087" data-attributes="member: 42582">This thread is in General. It's not about D&D exclusively, or even in particular. And I note that even your "normal for D&D" appears to exclude 4e D&D.The idea that is being described as "normal" - ie that the GM is the sole determiner of any fiction beyond the bodily motions of the PCs - is in my view not actually normal (if it was, skills like Gather Information couldn't work) and is a dogma and shibboleth that seems to have crystallised (as best I can tell) sometime in the first half of the 1980s.It can be tracked across editions of Classic Traveller, where the 1980s revisions introduce text that was not only absent, but was implicitly contradicted, in the 1977 version.My impression is that a lot of actual play in the 1970s was far more relaxed about player-introduced content I've got in mind things like the famous "baby balrog" in one of Gygax's campaigns; and even the shift from OD&D being very relaxed about players making up new character types - like balrogs - to Gygax's DMG being sternly against it. And Gygax is still relaxed about the matter in his discussion of stronghold-building (from his DMG, p 93):Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town, choosing an area of wooded hills as the general site. He then asks you if there is a place where he can build a small concentric castle on a high bluff overlooking a river. Unless this is totally foreign to the area, you inform him that he can do so.The difference between this and the Great Masters-wise check made to establish that Aramina truly recollects the location of Evard's tower is that what Gygax describes is (i) more informal, and (ii) not gated behind a player build decision (ie spending points to develop Great Masters-wise). But there is no difference in terms of whose ideas are establishing the content of the shared fiction. Just like Dungeon World, it is an example of "drawing maps but leaving blank spaces" and then looking to one of the players to fill in those blanks.What puzzles me is that no one seems ever to have thought the passage from Gygax worth mentioning, except for me! Whereas something basically the same but made more overt as a feature of playing other systems generates all this debate and discussion about "narrative perspective" or "narrative stance" or "narrative power".I'm certainly not Gygax's number-one advocate, but I think that his rulebooks demonstrate a clear sense of the dynamics of player agency for the sorts of games he was running, although - like [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] - I don't think he'd come up with a perfect set of tools to solve all the problems.</blockquote>

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