NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6781182" data-attributes="member: 177">Somewhere a couple of days ago, I saw someone mentioning how RPGs are unique in part because of the high level of detail in the game world.  I had to laugh.RPGs are generally limited to verbal communication speeds - you can only give as much detail as you can describe to the players.  Since, as you note, time is precious, as a practical matter, we leave *tons* of detail out, and allow convention and genre expectations to fill in most of those details.   The GM *can't* do a really full description of all things that might possibly matter to players in reasonable time - players are devious, and may need details down to whether floors and walls are held together with wood pegs or iron nails, and other minutiae.  And, to be honest, the players likely wouldn't remember the barrage of all the details you could give them anyway.  It'd become useless noise they would ignore.It is far more efficient to allow many details to be fuzzy, and really determine them only when it is found to matter.  We don't need to stipulate what the tabletop is made of until the player is considering setting it on fire.  We don't need to be sure if there's a chandelier until someone might want to swing from one.  Paying a resource to stipulate a detail is just a way of eliminating a "mother, may I?" loop of GM judgement call of whether they want to allow the player to try something.Some RPGs (like GUMSHOE) have other mechanics (like the Preparedness ability), that allow the player to make a check to see if they thought to bring along something they didn't stipulate at start.  Again, this gets around the waste of stipulating large amounts of detail that turn out not to matter, and instead allow the player to initiate a quick resolution for only the details that do matter to them.</blockquote>

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