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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8602762" data-attributes="member: 42582">If we're thinking of this in the context of a RPG, who established that "truth" about the shared fiction? A player, because it provides a solution to the destruction problem? The GM, as a consequence for failure on a lore check? There are a variety of possibilities here, which would reflect both different sorts of participant priorities and suggest different things about the subsequent campaign trajectory.Seriously? Your objection to a Tolkienesque-campaign is that it's not compatible with the GM running their preferred scenario? I mean, why is it not an objection to HotDQ that maybe the players don't care about Tiamat? Why does only the GM's preference as to what sort of fiction to engage with matter?And it's not like I'm saying anything outside the mainstream. There's an edition of D&D - namely, 4e D&D - that takes the idea of player-authored quests seriously. The obvious upshot of that is that the GM is not in sole control of the trajectory of the fiction; that in choosing what scenes to frame and scenarios to come up with, they have to consider the player-authored quests. If you don't want player-authored quests, or player-authored character backstory and goals, of course that's your prerogative. But in that case you can hardly complain that players are rather passive in their orientation towards the fiction that you serve up to them.</blockquote>