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DM question: how much do you incorporate PC backgrounds into the campaign?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7942622" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>No. There is one reality: the real world. And it doesn't need scare quotes to describe it.</p><p></p><p>The "reality" or "world" of the PCs <em>does </em>need scare quotes, because it is obviously not a reality at al. It is a fiction. It is authored. What you and [USER=6775031]@Saelorn[/USER] are advocating are various sorts of constraints on authorship, such as that things in the fiction be authored by way of random rolls (onewhat tables? ones you wrote up? is that metagaming?) rather than deliberate choice.</p><p></p><p>No RPG text has ever advocated that. Gygax always advocated <em>deliberate authorship</em> of the dungeon, with random generation used simply to fill in peripheral details. No one thinks that the Tomb of Horrors would be a better module if Gygax had rolled it all up rather than made the choices that he did in authoring it.</p><p></p><p>Stated at the level of generality appropriate to this current thread discussion, making choices about what brothers are like, or where they are in the gameworld, is no different from making choices about whether there are gobins or orcs on the first level of the dungeon.</p><p></p><p></p><p>And so are you setting yourself up as the arbiter for everyone else's game? (As [USER=6775031]@Saelorn[/USER] clearly is.)</p><p></p><p>If not, what point are you trying to make? Who in this thread is expressing the concern that their game is suffering due to an excess of implausibility? As far as I've seen it is only a criticism being levied by some against the games of others whom they've never met and with whom they've never played.</p><p></p><p>In my 4e game after <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/underdark-adventure-with-demons-beholders-elementals-and-a-hydra.330383/" target="_blank">the PCs defeated a ropet and some beholders</a>, when they explored they found the remains of a former member of The Order of the Bat, who had gone missing centuries before - the decision that such a thing was found was made by me as GM, and all the backstory made up on the spot, in interplay between me and the player whose PC was a member of The Order of the Bat. That PC was able to take some valuable things from the remains of his predecessor (ie magic items that the payer had on his "wishlist").</p><p></p><p>Implausible? Coincidence? Good luck? Fate? What does it matter? It's no more absurd than Gandalf and Thorin finding ancient swords of Gondolin in a trollhoard in the Ettenmoors.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7942622, member: 42582"] No. There is one reality: the real world. And it doesn't need scare quotes to describe it. The "reality" or "world" of the PCs [I]does [/I]need scare quotes, because it is obviously not a reality at al. It is a fiction. It is authored. What you and [USER=6775031]@Saelorn[/USER] are advocating are various sorts of constraints on authorship, such as that things in the fiction be authored by way of random rolls (onewhat tables? ones you wrote up? is that metagaming?) rather than deliberate choice. No RPG text has ever advocated that. Gygax always advocated [I]deliberate authorship[/I] of the dungeon, with random generation used simply to fill in peripheral details. No one thinks that the Tomb of Horrors would be a better module if Gygax had rolled it all up rather than made the choices that he did in authoring it. Stated at the level of generality appropriate to this current thread discussion, making choices about what brothers are like, or where they are in the gameworld, is no different from making choices about whether there are gobins or orcs on the first level of the dungeon. And so are you setting yourself up as the arbiter for everyone else's game? (As [USER=6775031]@Saelorn[/USER] clearly is.) If not, what point are you trying to make? Who in this thread is expressing the concern that their game is suffering due to an excess of implausibility? As far as I've seen it is only a criticism being levied by some against the games of others whom they've never met and with whom they've never played. In my 4e game after [url=https://www.enworld.org/threads/underdark-adventure-with-demons-beholders-elementals-and-a-hydra.330383/]the PCs defeated a ropet and some beholders[/url], when they explored they found the remains of a former member of The Order of the Bat, who had gone missing centuries before - the decision that such a thing was found was made by me as GM, and all the backstory made up on the spot, in interplay between me and the player whose PC was a member of The Order of the Bat. That PC was able to take some valuable things from the remains of his predecessor (ie magic items that the payer had on his "wishlist"). Implausible? Coincidence? Good luck? Fate? What does it matter? It's no more absurd than Gandalf and Thorin finding ancient swords of Gondolin in a trollhoard in the Ettenmoors. [/QUOTE]
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