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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5456059" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, you've lost me here. What is the GM presenting - beginnings? or endings? Beginnings don't need much of a world, as per the example in my previous post: tell the players to look at the PHB and build something out of that. As for endings, they don't come from the GM deciding in advance. They come from playing the game. And the necessary setting for framing and resolving a situation can also be provided by the GM in the course of playing the game.Other than the empires, the pantheon, the races, the planes, and some of the personalities who appear in the names and flavour texts of powers. And if you care to use it, there's even a town and map in the DMG (I don't use the Nentir Vale myself, but others do).I don't call that "having to create from the ground up".Huh? Permeable means permeable.Here is a passage from p 110 of Robert Ferguson, The Hammer and the Cross: A new history of the Vikings (Penguin, 2010):[Snorri] tells us of a Swedish king names Svegdir who crossed the Baltic on a sort of pilgrimage in search of ... the home of the gods and Odin. . . Tjodolf of Hvin described in verse the result of his search. Very drunk and on his way to bed one evening, he saw a dwarf sitting under a large stone. The dwarf lured him inside with a promise that he would meet Odin. Svegdir accepted and was never seen again.Here we have a real-world story about a person being tricked by a fey creature into entering a faerie mound and crossing the permeable boundary between the mortal world and the Feywild. Most D&D players probably don't know the story of Svegdir - I certainly didn't until I read the book I've quoted from - but I'd be surprised if they don't know some sort of story like this, even if it's only Rumpelstiltskin.I wasn't in any doubt that you don't like the default 4e setting. But it doesn't follow from your dislike (i) that there is not enough there to seed a game, nor (ii) that the game is therefore just about killing things and taking their stuff. Which are the claims you made.Just because it is a fantasy story, and I like fantasy, does not mean I will like the fantasy story presented.Before play I had a myth and history provided by the 4e PHB, DMG, MM and W&M (which you yourself deny establish a setting).Over the course of play I have built a world, some of it through prep but big chunks of it through play.Well, I wouldn't have had as many maps. Some of my NPCs would have been less developed. The backstory would probably be even more byzantine.I don't know what your approach to GMing is. But I know that I can run a session for my players with nothing but a map, some inhabitants and a few ideas linking that situation to the myth and history of the gameworld. (The most recent sessions didn't even have a complete map.) The details are worked out in play. This is, in my view, what 4e is designed to support.To put it another way: after 2 years of running this particular campaign, my campaign notes (not scenario notes) consist of 3 documents: a one page document fleshing out some myth details, a 2 page document fleshing out the more recent backstory for the campaign, that I've been adding to as I go along (so that's about 2000 words total), plus a timeline of events which is mostly notes of what the PCs have done but also some notes about what NPCs are doing at the same time - this is a bit over 1000 words.This is what I need to create situations and run my game. Obviously as the game progresses those notes will get longer. But I don't think that 3000 words over 2 years of play shows that I'm really a closet world builder! Earlier in this post I've quoted you talking about "gaps", but now you seem to be denying that there are gaps.The problem with your quantum mechanical analogy is that a fiction doesn't have to have a state until the author chooses. What sort of timber was used for the panelling of Sherlock Holmes' apartment in Baker Street? We don't know, because (at least as far as I've read through the stories, which admittedly isn't all of them) Conan Doyle doesn't tell us! And we can't infer it from anything else.From the fact that the wizard PC in my game rides a horse with stirrups, and walks through swamps, dungeons and the like, I think we can safely infer that he has footwear. But what sort? We don't know.If I'm making something up, I don't check it. I don't alter it. I create it. [Of course, I]from the point of view of the fictional inhabitants in the gameworld[/I], there is an answer. But given that, ex hypothesi, the content of their point of view hasn't been decided yet by the author, this doesn't get us very far.</blockquote>

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