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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5587307" data-attributes="member: 42582">Nagol and S'mon, thanks for the replies - can't XP Nagol again yet, though.We differ on the first of these - I fit the starting situation to the players and their PCs.I'm not sure about the second - once an element is in play in my game, its revealed nature remains constant, but stuff that has not yet been revealed about it (eg perhaps its origin, or where it was/what it was doing 5 years ago) is still up for grabs. Often I'll have a loose notion of what some of these things might be, but will often precisify or change them on the fly as seems best-suited to push the game forward.Good example. I could imagine handling this in different ways. Thus, in my game the players had a chance to rescue the mother of one of the PCs from a goblin fortress, but left her in a room on her own while they searched for a way out. When they came back, I explained that they found her dead. (I'd already decided that this would be the outcome unless very affirmative steps were taken to prevent it - and they weren't.)But in circumstnaces where the PCs failure to protect his mother had a different cause - for example, he was doing something equally heroic elsewhere - then how I resolved the matter might be different.I strongly agree with this. Relating it back to Starfox's scenario, the reason why the GDS trio ignored the world-ending issue is therefore crucial. If the players actively decided to continue planting, dancing and gazing in the knowledge that the world is soon doomed, then ending the world affirms those choices. But if - as Starfox seemed to have in mind - they are just not interested in the world-saving thing and treat it as an irrelevant distraction to the game they actually want to play, then I think that the GM insisting on his/her plot and ending the gameworld would tend to be the disempowering way of proceeding.This works for me - the stuff on the right-hand side of "for one thing" especially. As I read Starfox and Vespucci, what you say there accords with what they're saying, namely, that the setting/timeline etc have a metagame as well as ingame significance, which a GM can't repudiate just by saying "But that's what is happening in the gameworld!"What the actual metagame significance is, for whom, and how the play group as a whole should best respond to it, is going to be a particular matter for each group. I don't think any general rules - such as "stick to your prepared timeline or you'll invalidate player choices" or "always apply natural consequences to PC actions" - can be given here, because of the range of variation in interests, dynamics etc across groups.I'm not sure what you mean here by "rebuild", so I'm not sure what you're describing.But my general experience as a GM has been that players don't object when the parts of the gameworld that reach out to grab them are mostly the sorts of things that they are interested in engaging with (so, to give a very simple example, when the party contains a lot of Raven Queen worshippers they encounter more than the population average of Orcus cultists).In my game the PCs do not appreciate all developments, but I try hard to ensure that the players do.</blockquote>

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