Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8141879" data-attributes="member: 42582">All the doors, and alleyways, and the like, ultimately don't seem to recover any agency for the players: if the GM is one narrating all of them, and all of what's behind them (door) or in them (alleyways) then all the players are achieving by engaging with them is obliging the GM to narrate more content.The pony-riding and soup-asking-for is a different matter: as you say, that doesn't appear to be focused so much on triggering GM narration as on identifying a subject-matter of the fiction that the GM will let the players exert some authority over.What a nightmare! You could hardly get further in stakes from Am I right that Evard's tower is about here somewhere? than Tell me about the differences between you leek and your potato soups, my good tavern-keep!On levels of detail, and which to elide: I still think that this is a case of the Gygaxian form enduring past its original function.The classic dungeon has two characteristics relevant to this particular discussion: (1) it is very sparse/austere in its detail - all its relevant architecture and contents can be spelled out in a workable, human-generated and managed, key; (2) establishes a definite sense of what is relevant and what is not.That second is a function of tradition as much as anything, but the traditions seems to be quickly established and pretty easily teachable. For instance, doors, floor, ceilings are important in terms of their role in entry, egress, traps etc. But generally the colour of these things is not relevant - which we quickly learn from the absence of descriptions of colour of things in the sample dungeons in Gygax's DMG, Moldvay Basic etc.Likewise we don't need to write down in the key, nor narrate at the table, every crack or lip or uneven finish in a wall: that only matters to finding secret doors or climbing walls, and in both cases can be subsumed into the roll for success.And if a GM starts narrating the colour of room ceilings, or the cracks in the walls, that's a sign that these matter in a way they typically don't.Where things start to go haywire is the GM who thinks one day I might run a dungeon where the ceiling colours matter and so, to avoid meta-gaming, I'm going to narrate the colour of every ceiling from the get-go. Generalise that to everything else one can conceive of being relevant - cracks in walls, poorly-finished stonework, etc - and we get an absolute nightmare. Take this out of the dungeon and into any realistically inhabited place, and it gets worse - do we really have to key, and then narrate, every bucket, bale of straw, etc in every inn and every peasant hovel?The same point applies beyond rooms and their contents: in principle every occupant of a dungeon is established in the key and has a place on the map, but how do we handle that for a farmstead, or a village, let alone a town or city?At which point there seem to be two main ways of going: (1) endless back-and-forth between players and GM which has the superficial appearance of action declaration and resolution but really is just the players triggering narration from the GM (what's in the room? can we find a person who will help us with such-and-such? etc etc); or (2) find a completely different approach to establishing these essentially trivial or background details that become salient only when the players express some interest in them.There's more than one version of option (2): AW and DW do it differently from Burning Wheel or Classic Traveller, for instance. But what all have in common is that they abandon any pretence to map-and-key resolution.EDIT: I just read [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s post not far upthread. We seem to be on very much the same page.</blockquote>

Verification