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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8286688" data-attributes="member: 6704184">Narrative, the world, the fiction. Pick your choose. Me too, but I choose where to put my work carefully, and I’d rather put more work into adjudication than in front-loading world-building more. I really wish the new forums had a function to include quoted text when quoting someone. I keep having to scroll up and see which part someone is replying to. So, this is in reply to “reduces room for improv”. I allow the PCs to create or change aspects of the world via improvised storytelling during play. This ties into what I’ll talk about wrt “volcanic” worldbuilding, but basically, I only decide the general difficulty of a thing ahead of time. I often don’t even keep an NPC statblock as written if what the PCs come up with changes what I want from the encounter. So, because I haven’t decide exactly the inner workings of a lock ahead of time, I can decide in response to a bad roll, that it is a trick lock and they need to investigate it in order to unlock it, or I can simply say, “it’s odd, you feel like it should have worked.” And then the players, directly or indirectly, determine that it’s a trick lock by speculating about it and then investigating further. Then, when they roll a high investigate check or arcana check or whatever, the nature of the lock and what stumped them initially is revealed, either allowing a newcheck or even negating the need for another check.  likewise, I might say, it’s an odd lock, how do you approach it? And their response might lead to a tools check, an investigate, and an arcana, and which rolls succeed or fail might determine, with input from the players, what is happening in the fiction.  I imagine that is both due to our differing preferences and their effect on how a given resolution system plays out, and a driver of why we prefer different things. The causality of preference is loopy like that, IME. Not just that, but that is part of it. Rather it is about building enough of the world for it to feel complete and alive, but leaving room for your ideas about the world to change, and being willing to throw out pages or even chapters of information you’d prepared because soemthing the PCs said or did made some other idea into a much better idea for this particular campaign.   That means that in my Eberron campaign, there is a noble house in Breland and Thrane that is engaged in a shadow-war with The Twelve in order to break their monopolies, and it means that I don’t actually know yet whether Erandis Vol is actually a villain or not, and even if I did “know”, my answer could change next session when I get a strong indication that my BoV Paladin PC is looking for a tragic story to redeem some bittersweet ending out of, or is looking for an enemy that is visceral to her story and who she can just brutally murder without remorse. IME, avoiding front loading creates a smoother player experience, as well. Whereas for me, D&D, especially 5e, runs just as smoothly either way.</blockquote>

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