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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5720175" data-attributes="member: 26473">I read your linked post and noticed that you edited part of it out. Here's the post with the edited bit restored.I agree that roleplaying games are not novels, but describing the adventurers as "pawns" molded by an "all-knowing writer" strikes me as pretty over-the-top and nothing like the relationship I experience between referee and players in traditional roleplaying games.Perhaps more importantly, the players and their characters possess the means to change "the shape and direction of the game-world" through their in-character decisions. What they don't have in the campaigns I run is the ability to edit the setting through out-of-character choices.The presumption here is that players want to be able to create setting details in actual play. Slipping off my <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?17565-My-worst-campaign&p=290108#post290108" target="_blank">Viking hat</a>for a moment, as a player what I want from a roleplaying game is the opportunity to experience the world through the eyes of my character. I want my control to extend to the things my character senses and manipulates, and no further. Creating setting details at the meta level actually detracts from that; my experience is no longer one of exploring the game-world through my character-avatar when I can make a candlestick conveniently appear when needed by spending a drama point.It isn't about "all knowing" control at all, but rather how the players engage the game-world in their imagination and what they want to experience from it. With respect to the example of the adventurer attempting to find an alternate route, I think the player's question is a perfectly reasonable one; it's the kind of question that comes up in my campaign pretty often, and while sometimes there's a roll involved, most of the time, the answer is, "From living in Paris, you know that . . . ."The idea that the game-world as represented by the map is inherently malleable, that it exists only in the broadest possible strokes until the players interact with it at which point details appear, assumes that there is no setting which exists independent of the characters. I don't think that presumption is true for all games at all.</blockquote>

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