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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6437053" data-attributes="member: 42582">No one is saying that they did just magically appear! (Except maybe [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION].)You (togehter with sme others) are the one who said that, if the GM says "yes" in reply to the player's query "Are there any boxes", this is tantamount to the boxes magically appearing!The point that I, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and others are making is that you were wrong to say so. That the fact that the GM makes up the boxes in response to a player request doesn't mean that they didn't always exist in the gameworld, anymore than the fact that the GM writes up the backstory of a vampire as part of a random encounter roll means that the vampire just magically appeared (past and all!), or anymore than the fact that a player intitiates a paladin quest for the warhorse means that the horse and it's guardian weren't already part of the gameworld.Running an RPG requires creating new material, including new backstory, in response to the demands of play. Using the desires of the players as a guide to that doesn't make the authorship any more metagame-y, nor make the products of that authorship any more magical from the ingame perspective.The point is that the GM doesn't have the whole of the camaign world pre-placed at the start of the game. Gygax expressly talked about this in the passage I've quoted upthread. Even those GMs who are running level 1 to 20 adventure paths will create new elements during the course of play, even if they are just minor NPCs and relatively insignificant locations (eg temples where the PCs can pay for healing).A GM who does not author content (or pay for someone else to do so, eg by buying a module) will have nothing to communicate. That's my point. Campaign backstory doesn't write itself. Dungeon maps and notes don't write themselves. NPC descriptions don't write themselves. All this stuff has to be made up by someone. And I have never heard of a campaign in which the GM authored every single bit of this stuff in advance.</blockquote>

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