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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9624766" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is obscurantism.The players do not, in any literal sense, explore the setting and discover things.I've watched a video of you and [USER=13383]@robertsconley[/USER] RPGing, that you linked to some while ago. It looked exactly like every other bit of RPGing I've encountered and heard of - the GM said stuff, the players said stuff, the stuff being said was integrated in various ways, follows in various ways, etc.I've just taken a CoC module of my shelf - The Vanishing Conjurer. It is full of descriptions of events and places, like a cross between a Lonely Planet, a newspaper and an encyclopaedia.Here's just a few examples, from pp 6, 8, 18-19:Horne starts talking in earnest . . . "Philip Leclair has vanished off the face of the Earth!" . . . If the investigators go to the Chancellor's Theatre and approach Weiss directly, and enquire about Leclair, he will deny ever having met or seen the man. . . . As the investigators open the cases . . . materialising in the air, is the apparition of a burning man! This 'ghost' is Philip Leclair. . . . What actually happened to him is explained here - though the investigators will only discover most of this if Leclair emerges from tonight's performance alive. . . . Leclair was fascinated by the apparatus . . . [and] while he was examining the arch . . . he was overpowered by three cultists . . . [and] was placed within the gate apparatus as an offering . . . He is currently suspended in a state of limbo between two planes of existence. Leclair's manifestation lasts around thirty seconds, during which time he attempts to warn the investigators and tell them what they must do. . .  ". . . open the gate for pity's sake!! . . ."The GM's job is to present this material to the players, when the fictional circumstances make it appropriate to do so. And the players are not reasoning from the tone of Horne's earnest talking (as a police investigator might) or from the smell of the flames of the ghost (as a chemist might); they are reasoning from what the GM says.The players can't "discover* what has happened to Leclair except by declaring actions for their PCs that will then make it appropriate for the GM to tell them that stuff.And as I have posted, repeatedly, working from and extrapolating from notes is not the only way to constrain what is said.</blockquote>

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