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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6437027" data-attributes="member: 42582">You may not see the line of descent. I've lived it.For instance, it's a small step from (1) the player of the paladin can initiate an adventure, and oblige the GM to introduce the gameworld elements necessary to support that adventure, to (2) the player has given his PC chess proficiency, so I guess I'll stick a chess-master in the next inn the PCs come to.My first memory of using technique (2) is in 1986, in the contex of an Oriental Adventures campaign - except the "next inn" was in fact an ogre stronghold in the hills of Kozakura. The PC beat them at whatever game he could play (I can't remember now) and some ingame benefit (also long forgottnen) flowed from that.It's a small step from (2) to (3) the PCs are both thieves, so I'll confront them with challenges that involve sneaking and climbing. It's also a small step to (4) the players are really keen to have their PCs fight more cultists, so I think I'll make this randomly encountered bandit group a front for the cult.My first memory of using (3) is in 1987, when I ran a campaign for two players both playing multi-class thieves. It started in the Keep on the Borderlands (but the Caves of Chaos never came into things), and then moved to Critwall (I located the Keep in Greyhawk's Shield Lands) as the PCs followed the trail of the cult to which the Keep's evil priest belonged. The game itself was almost entirely improv on my part, outside of the rather bare bones provided by the Keep and the Greyhawk Gazetteer.That campaign also saw quite a bit of (4).At this point, how far is the game away from Burning Wheel, in which the GM is expected to design adventures that expressly build on, and push against, the Beliefs, Instincts and Relationships that the players have built into their PCs? The only difference is that the BW rules for PC-building produce more of this sort of flag-flying information, and the GM advice expressly advises the GM to have regard to this stuff.BW also has mechanics that descend from the Traveller Streetwise example - eg Circles, which extend the Streetwise example into social contact more generally, and factor into the DC not just the obscurity of the contact but the likelihood of the person being around here and now, in the next suburb, or in the next village. Not a very radical step, in my view.Obviously there are approaches to play - most notably [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s (3) above, of plot-heavy GM-driven adventure-path style gaming - in which techniques (2) through (4) see little or no use, and in which the GM might even ignore (1) and handle the paladin's calling of a warhorse in some more GM-driven fashion. But those approaches have never been the totality of D&D play. (Especially not in the first decade or so of the game.)On this issue my view is basically the same as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s.If the GM has a dungeon map drawn up, with a key, from which s/he is not deviating, then it is true to say that the players are exploring the gameworld through their characters. Tomb of Horrors, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Ghost Tower of Inverness and White Plume Mountain are reall paradigms of this sort of play.But if a player asks the GM "Are there any boxes" and the answer to that question is not already given by some sort of pre-authorship by the GM, then there are a few options.The GM might have a "random chance of boxes in alleys" table, intended as a type of world-simulator. In that case, the GM makes a roll and tells the player what his/her PC sees. I'm happy that this can be called a form of exploration.The GM might think to him-/herself , "The players would have fun if there were boxes here", and so answers "Yes, you see some boxes." That's not really world-exploration at that point. If the GM pretends that s/he rolled a die on the "random boxes" table, the illusion of world-exploration might be maintained. But what really happened was that the GM engaged in some authorship at the behest of the player. If the GM dispenses with the illusion - eg by answering "Sure, why not - you see some boxes in a stack at the end of the alley" - then it is clear to the players that they did not just explore a pre-given world, but rather instigated a deliberate act of authorship by the GM.At that point, the difference between GM authorship in response to player requests/suggestins, and player authorship by spending fate points or whatever, is a difference of (important but) technical detail connected to which distributions of authority best achieve desired relationships between backstory creation, scene-framing and action-resolution. It's not marking any fundamental cleavage between game types.As both the beard and the boxes example were presented in this thread, it was taken for granted that it is the GM who gets to decide the answer. Both examples were introduced to illustrate why a GM might have reason to say "yes" when a player asks "Is the NPC bearded?" or "Are there any boxes in the alley".The key point is that, if the player knows the GM said "yes" simply because the player asked then the player knows that this was not "exploring the gameworld" - it was helping to generate the gameworld. Likewise, at my table if a player asks something like this and I say "No" then the players know that I have something else in mind - it sends a metagame signal that something is up.As I said earlier in this post, once the GM is happy to send these metagame signals, the difference between GM authorship at the behest of the players and player authorship is a technical one about optimal design given the purposes of the game. It is not some fundamental point of demarcation between RPGing and something else.I don't think it has a great bearing on the scenes yet to be framed for all groups. I've certainly seen posts on these boards in which posters advocate designing adventures (dungeon-based or "event"-based) independently of any knowledge of the PCs the players will be brining along to engage with them.Similarly, I'm sure there are many GMs - especially those who like to run games in [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s mode (3) - who, even if they say yes to boxes because it will be fun for the players, like to maintain the illusion that what was really going on was world exploration, either of pre-authored stuff or of some random determination on the "Junk in alleys" table.</blockquote>

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