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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2433426" data-attributes="member: 7240">Oh good. When one maks such dangerously long posts, there is the danger that nobody will wade through the whole thing and, if they do, find it a rewarding experience.When I do this kind of thing, I build worlds that fit with the mainstream classical Greek theory of how philsophy comes into being. Because the philosophy is part of the physical structure of the world itself, wherever you are and whatever you look at will reflect this structure. Unlike a murder mystery in which the truth can only be discovered by investigating phenomena proximate to the event, the nature of my universes is pretty much discoverable at any location within them. In a campaign I was co-GMing back in my home town and on which I continue to consult by phone, the place is littered with clues all referencing the same thing. We assume that 90+% of all clues will be ignored or missed but that's okay because the world is signifying to the characters everywhere all the time. As a GM, I don't know which aspects of the structure will be apprehended first and what the PCs' interim models of the universe will look like as they acquire pieces of knowledge in an unpredictable order.That's why I (as opposed to my players) primarily navigate my campaigns metatexually rather than textually; having a unifying metatext drastically reduces the number of requirements that the text look a particular way. If I had a textually grounded definition of what the City of Glass was, then I would end up forcing the characters to end up in a city that was in a particular location, looked a particular way, was run by particular people. But because my only requirement is that the final place they go be, in some way symbolically readable as the City of Glass, there is minimal perceived railroading. The richer the metatextual level of the game, in my experience, the more the players' acts of discovery and acts of creation/invention collapse into one another at the textual level.{QUOTE]Good DMing takes, above all, adaptability, and the ideal 'Story World' has a rich enough symbolism that even if the players go in the wrong direction, you can work with their actions and link them back to the central theme (or even adopt another, equally satisfying theme mid-campaign).</blockquote>Exactamente!Yep. I had two players quit in episode one because they didn't want to co-operate with the Venetians in their plan to find and seize the grail, in one case because the character wouldn't accept patriarchal authority and in another because he wouldn't accept Christianity. But then, I think that this problem plagues all kinds of campaigns that require the party to function as a team.It was completely different. It was one of Teflon Billy's superhero campaigns called the Justice Hurricaine; it had no metatext; it was navigated primarily by the GM's incredible improvisational skills and unerring sense of genre. I used to commute to it 4.5 hours each way every week it was so damned great. As the GM expressed it, he had been planning for the campaign to be like The Watchmen but it ended up being The Tick; I've never laughed so hard or reliably in my entire life. We had a professional artist in the group who drew comic-book style frames of the action in the game. We had a guy who played a Japanese superhero who could move his lips independently of his words playing a Japanese superhero who was being dubbed into English. I played a creature who had been created by Soviet scientists as a spying device (it was a super-intelligent AI stuffed inside a teddy bear who could shoot deadly laser beams from his eyes). He was exposed to alien technology and turned into a 9' tall bear with glowing eyes and a tungsten carbide skeleton. But he still thought like a children's toy; his battle cry in every combat was, "Hi everybody! I'm Brown Bear!"Not every aspect. The world would over-hint and be didactic. Like most systems, mytho-poetic world generators predict much but leave a lot of room for diversity and randomness, at least if done well.This is true -- it takes one campaign to figure out the world. Then, you make a new one. But usually, like a cryptic crossword puzzle, the realization of the general theme and operationalizing it are not simultaneous and, typically, the most fun is operationalizing the predictive model you have recently discovered, through play.What is the nature of the system/physics where these different things intersect? And how does it not fall into the trap of being a signifying, predictive, potentially moral system too? Different levels of local complexity and randomness=good and your world building strategy sounds less dissimilar to mine than you might think but I can't figure out how you answer above question in your model.I like your adaptive gridding concept, though. It seems like the big difference between it and my style is that you don't define universes that need to be "solved" by the players, allowing the party to just operate within them and fight battles within their context rather than having to transcend the context in order to complete the game. Right back at you![/QUOTE]

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