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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3405548" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm sure that's true! I've tried to disambiguate some of them. It's true that I haven't been using "scripting" and "planning" as synonyms. For example, the settings for Hero Quest (Glorantha) and The Dying Earth (Vance's Dying Earth) are both quite well planned, but the adventures in those games are not scripted.My own view is that most D&D adventures - at least the published ones - don't allow the players to choose sides. They are written with a clear expectation that the players will loot the dungeon, not defend it, or with the expectation that the players will fight the BBEG, not ally with him/her.The published settings also tend to make similar assumptions about who the allies and villains are. This is obviously so in FR, I think, and Greyhawk also isn't really designed as a setting to support players of Orcish PCs defending their homelands against the religious fanatics of Furyondy and Veluna. By "the world" I had in mind less its constituents - planets, cities, people, etc - and more its meaning and thematic orientation. When playing in Middle Earth, for example, the setting material is written with an assumption built in that the thematic aim of the game is narrow success by good in its struggle with apparently overwhelming evil.In that sense, I think that if players in Dragonlance try to roleplay betrayal, the game will de-rail because the world hasn't been build to support that sort of thematic twist. The resolution in favour of good's eventual triumph is assumed in the materials. A GM could re-write it, I guess, but I suspect that at that point a lot of the appeal of the world would be lost. A pity - I think those systems illustrate the possibility of different approaches to RPGs from the "default" approach that AD&D and D&D 3E encourage.</blockquote>

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