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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6447555" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's equally been pointed out that your distinction here between what you label "player authorship" and character abilities is arbitrary and misses the point.When the player character paladin calls for his/her warhorse, the GM has to add material into the gameworld which hitherto was not there. The minimum content of this material is a warhorse in a context from which it cannot be extracted except via some sort of adventuring.And it is a player decision - namely, the decision to have his/her PC call for a warhorse - that requires the GM to incorporate that material. The fact that that decision is a decision to have the PC do something doesn't change the fact that, in the real world, the player decision obliges the GM to author fictional content that satisfies certain fairly narrow parameters.Suppose the player of a thief had the ability, when s/he gained 6th level, to declare that the guidlmaster sends his/he PC on a mission to prove his/her eligibility for deputy guild leadership. You could imagine the rulebook specifying the mission in basically the same terms as the DMG describes the warhorse quest (p 18) - "a task of some small difficulty which will take a number of days, possibly 2 or more weeks, and will certainly test the mettle of the thief". This would differ from the paladin ability in that there is no incharacter action that triggers the visit from the guildmaster to set the mission. But from the point of view of player authorship it would be identical - as far as control over the austhorship of the gameworld is concerned, both the actual paladin ability and the hypothetical thief ability impose authorship obligations on the GM in exactly the same way.I don't understand why you think it is dismissive of "the first 12% of the whole of D&D's run thus far" to point out that, by the end of that time, elements were appearing in the rulebooks which directly addressed tensions in the game form between GM authorship, world-exploration-driven action resolution, and the imperative of maintaining player engagement and "fun".I'm not ignoring any differences. I'm posting about things that I think are relevant to the OP and the issues that discussion of it has raised. My view - which you don't share, but that doesn't make me change my mind - is that once it is recognised that the wishes of the players will influence the GM's authorship of game content, the difference between the GM responding to the players' desires, and the players having the capacity to directly implement their desires, is a purely technical one. I also think that the difference between a paladin player who can force the GM to put a warhorse quest into the game by using a PC ability, and a thief player who can force the GM to put a guild mission into the game by using a purely player resource, is a technical one. There is no difference between the two as far as impact upon GM control over game content is concerned.I'm not conflating them. I'm arguing that setting up a gameworld for RPG play will, in many if not most cases, give rise to exactly the sorts of concerns and tensions that lead to discussions of "tailoring" in 3E (although the very rapid scaling of 3E, plus its lack of evasion rules, increase the tensions even more).Gygax discusses a concrete case - where the splitting of ingame timelines between two groups of PCs means that one player will not be able to turn up to sessions with the other players. This creates (at least) two options : player A either can't play for multiple sessions, or the GM sets up a new dungeon in a different time and place for player A's PC to explore. Gygax suggests that the second option is the kinder one, for obvious reasons - it means that player A gets to keep playing the game.Suppose that you are "adding to the setting to ensure that there is plenty for players to do". What are you going to add to the setting, if the PCs are averaging 6th to 10th level? Another kobold stronghold? Or a steading of ogres or giants? Gygax certainly implies - for instance, in his discussion of developing other planes for adventuring - that the new stuff added will roughly correlate with material that is relevant for adventuring by the PCs. (Hence the phrase "needs of the participants".)This is all tailoring of content to be suitable for play by the particular players the GM is anticipating running in his/her game.It's not a strawman. Gygax expressly suggests it as one option, on p 38 of his DMG:Players who choose to remove their characters from the centre of dungeon activity will find that "a lot has happened while they were away", as adventures in the wilderness certainly use up game days with rapidity, while the shorter time scale of dungeon adventuring allows many game sessions during a month or two of game time. Of course, this might mean that the players involved in the outdoor someplace will either have to come home to "sit around" or continue adventuring in wilderness and perhaps in some distant dungeon (if you [the DM] are kind); otherwise, they will perforce be excluded from game sessions which are taking place during a period of game time in which they were wandering about the countryside doing other things. The latter sanction most certainly appies to characters learning a new language, studying and training for promotion in level, or of someplace manufacturing magic items.What do you think Gygax means by "sit around" or "will perforce be excluded from game sessions"? He is talking about the possibility of a player being told s/he can't join in a session because his/her PC is at the wrong point in the timeline. And he is suggesting, as a possible alternative to exlcusion from play altogether, that a kind GM will place an alternative dungeon in the distant wilderness for that player to take his/her PC into.Which is another example of shaping the content of the gameworld to reflect the desires and expectations of the players.In my experience, there are any number of ways a player can do this. S/he can ask the GM "Are there any boxes?" Or, speaking as his/her PC, can ask "Do I see any boxes?" Or, speaking in the third person, can ask "Does [insert PC name] notice any boxes in the alley?"Given that I am the first poster in this thread to have raised the possibility of boxes in the alley, I believe I am an authority on what my point was. And my point was this: in answering the player's question, the GM might want to consider following the player's lead. Or, to put it in negative terms, there is no general reason that I'm aware of for the GM to say "no" and thereby block whatever plan the player had in mind that would involve boxes.As I have repeatedly pointed out, this tells us nothing about how a GM should decide what the answer to the player's question is.Nothing in any of the GMing advice I have ever read, including Moldvay's and Gygax's, suggests that the GM should ignore the player's desires in giving an answer. Since the mid-80s it's been obvious to me that one feasible GMing approach is to follow the players' leads when they ask such questions. And I don't think I was the only person to notice this before reading The Forge.It's not just, or even primarily, for simplification of setting design. It's about game design. Planned vs wandering encounters are crucial to the play of the game: players have their PCs raid placed monsters (for their loot) while trying to avoid wanderers. Unguarded treasures are typically smaller than guarded ones, or more likely to be trapped. (This is especially so in B/X.)If the GM decided that placed monsters might be wandering at any time, these basic design features of the game would be undone.By this measure nothing is a lottery - even a random lever dungeon can be explored, after all, if the players are prepared to sacrifice sufficiently many PCs and henchmen during the process. But the distinction between skilled and lottery play was still a real one, drawn by real players of the game.Simply reiterating that "roleplaying means that the players play their PCs" doesn't tell us anything about whether a given game is a skill game or a lottery game. To explain that difference, you have to talk about the world design from the real-world point of view: what sorts of information is available to the players, what sorts of considerations the GM has in mind in authoring those elements, incuding the informational elements (eg rumours, as mentiond by  [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] upthread), etc.</blockquote>

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