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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8699300" data-attributes="member: 42582">This whole discussion (of which your post is a part) rests on so many unstated assumptions that it's hard to unpack them all.One of those assumptions is that what situation a GM frames ought to be connected, or ought to appear to be connected, to where the players have their PCs go. This assumption comes right of out dungeon-crawling, "hidden gameboard" play. Why people who don't engage in that sort of play would still hang on to the assumption I don't know, but we can see that they are.Another assumption is that it is important that players have some control/influence, even if it is blind control/influence, over what scenes their PCs are framed into. Hence the obsession with whether or not the players can make choices that will let their PCs "avoid" the ogre. Again, this assumption comes right out of dungeoneering play - where part of the skill of play is for the players to choose whether to enter a room and run the risk of its inhabitant in exchange for the chance of treasure, or to bypass a room because they're not ready to tackle it yet. (You can replace the word "room" with "level" and still have an accurate description of classic dungeoneering play.)Suppose instead of an ogre who wants to kill the PCs, and who might drop treasure if they defeat it, we make it an encounter with a prophet. Or with a water-seller. Or with the PCs long-lost cousin. What if the logic of the encounter, in the fiction, is not to provide a wargame-style challenge or a chance of running a risk in exchange for loot, but rather to foreshadow, or to provide an opportunity, or to link present events to resonant backstory? There are good and bad ways for a GM to set up those sorts of encounters, but we won't get much insight into those by pontificating about the way random ogres are placed behind dungeon doors.The previous paragraph has also brought to light a third assumption: that the meaningfulness of an encounter is nothing beyond its risk/reward profile in dungeon-crawling terms. As opposed to, say, what the player might decide their PC will part with for the chance to obtain water. Or how the player will have their PC respond to the return of their cousin.And there is a closely-related fourth assumption: that meaning flows predominantly from the GM's control over the fiction. That is, that all the players are brining is a willingness to run risks of being bopped on the head by ogres in exchange for the chance of grabbing some loot, and that more-or-less everything else about the fiction will flow from the GM. But what if the player is the one who establishes that their PC has a long-lost cousin? Or that their PC is waiting for a particular sign? Or that their PC is trapped is lost, parched, in the desert? And so the meaning of the GM's decision making about who or what the PC meets isn't driven by the logic of dungeon-crawling, but by other sorts of logics - is the GM honouring or thwarting the way the player has introduced these stakes into the game? For instance (and borrowing, with slight alteration, an example from Luke Crane's Burning Wheel rulebooks), if the player establishes as their PC's raison d'etre that they are searching to find their long-lost cousin, then the GM who has the player meet the cousin in the first encounter of the first session has probably made a bad GMing decision. The decision doesn't become any better because the GM rolled percentile dice first ("There's a 20% chance the person behind the red door is the cousin") or because the GM decided in advance that the cousin lives in a hut to the north of the village (so if the PCs head north they meet the cousin, but if they head south they don't). In RPGing where the players are the primary source of meaning, the decisions that GM's have to make to honour that meaning and avoid running roughshod over it rarely have anything to do with these conventions of "hidden gameboard" play.</blockquote>

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