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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4831116" data-attributes="member: 58197">Indeed. In the real world, if I'm wondering whether a giant meteor hit St. Louis, and I want to know bad enough, I can saddle up and head out to St. Louis and look for the freakin' crater. Either it's there or it isn't. Now, that still leaves plenty of room for speculation (was it a meteor or a nuke? when did it happen? did anyone know it was going to happen? is this actually where St. Louis used to be? did St. Louis ever exist at all?), but I can see with my own two eyes that there is, or is not, a crater. It's not open to debate.In a fictional world, the voice of the author(s) is the equivalent of "your own two eyes." (There's some shadiness about the edges here, what with first-person versus third-person and unreliable narrators and all that, but in general, it is expected that the reader shall regard the narrative as true within the reality of the fictional world.) Since we can't actually go to Middle-Earth and see if Barad-dur was destroyed, we agree to an unspoken compact with Tolkien: If he says Barad-dur was destroyed, we shall accept that in the world of the story, it was so.It gets a little stickier with RPG settings, of course, and different DMs have different takes. But in general, the basic assumptions of the setting serve as "verifiable reality" for the players. If the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide says that Elminster lives in Shadowdale, then we accept that it is so - unless the DM says up front, "In my version of FR, Elminster lives in Waterdeep." It isn't a rumor, it's a verifiable fact, which some of the PCs may well have verified in the past. Having such verifiable facts available helps the players to feel that they have some grasp on what's going on in the game world.IMO, the best settings are those which limit themselves to describing things that are verifiable, while leaving room for vast amounts of interpretation. For instance, the original Dark Sun boxed set described the ruined city of (IIRC) Kalidnay, with a ziggurat in the middle that had been cracked open like an egg, and streets littered with skeletons. It also mentioned that Kalak of Tyr was building a giant ziggurat and expending vast resources to do so. But it didn't actually say what happened in Kalidnay, or what Kalak was doing or why. That was up to the DM to decide, and the players to guess.</blockquote>

Verification