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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 7652497" data-attributes="member: 58416">I agree that players tend to be more engaged when their character is tied to the game world.  I also highly enjoy some of the things described in the OP.  However, that is not the only way; nor do I feel it should be because not every player is going to fit into the same style of play.In one of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy games I ran, the only part of the world I had created was one town.  At the beginning of the campaign, I gave the PCs general info about the town -the things everyone there would know.  That town is where the campaign would begin, but, beyond that, I told them to create their backstories, and I would build the rest of the world around that.  It worked very similar to some of what the OP describes.  Two members of the group decided to be dwarven brothers who came from mountains west of town; as such, it was established that there was a dwarven clan and mountains to the west.  One member of the group decided to be a priest from a church in town; as such, it was established that that particular faith was in town.  ...and so on, and so on.  I highly enjoyed doing things that way, and I liked that everyone was invested in the game.  Currently, I am a player in a Star Wars game.  My choices during character creation didn't change the universe or what was in it.  However, the game system did give me hooks to tie myself into what was going on.  In this case, the campaign world was not build around me; instead, my character was built around the campaign world.  I feel that is an entirely valid way to do things as well.  In many cases, when I've been a DM for some players who needed some structure to be nudged forward, and they have preferred experiences in which they could build something which was given definition by what was already established.  I believe -a lot of the time- a group will have some mix of both.  There are going to be players who thrive on the idea of being able to add something to the world with their choices, and by that I mean filling in some of the blanks left by the GM.  There are also going to be players who prefer more structure; they don't want to change the world and fill in blanks, but they do want to be a part of the world and explore what is in it; interact with it.  The latter might very well still have a desire to fill in some blanks, but possibly on a scale which is more organic and grows from play rather than being predestined before the game begins.  Neither approach is right or wrong; simply different, and in no circumstance would I ever suggest these are the only two styles of play.  There are some who prefer to engage the game as a game first, and maybe -maybe- get involved in the creative endeavor second.  The numbers of the game, and a sense of winning by using those numbers is what intrigues them.  As with above, I do not believe this is right or wrong.  It is certainly not my preference, and I very much prefer a different style, but what I like and dislike is not the same as what someone else likes or dislikes.  It is also my opinion that there are systems which encourage (or are at least better suited) to certain approaches.Some of my most frustrating times with D&D have been when what I wanted to do with a character -what I felt I should do when considering the investment I had in the story and the fiction and my character- was at odds with what the game system said I should do, and there was little I could do to reconcile the two.  The less a system's structure causes me to feel that way, the more I find I can enjoy the rpg experience.  Note, this isn't the same as saying I cannot enjoy the experience; I simply prefer that a game's fluff and crunch have a coherent enough relationship that conflicts like the one's I'm mentioning here do not happen often.  The same thing occasionally happens from the GM side of the table as well; there have been times when I've felt that what I was trying to build didn't make sense in the context of the game I was using at the time.</blockquote>

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