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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8861584" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Ultimately for me it's a matter of how well indexed and crossreferenced it is, how well designed, and how well it integrates with a virtual tabletop.The reasons I, after paying for a published product, still feel the need to make up my own radically different person partially have to do with my own desire to be creative or adapt to player decisions the designers never could have anticipated, but more often they are driven by inability to find the information I need quickly enough, the design being inadequate in my opinion, or needing to restructure things around a map I found for free online.So for me the ultimate product in this vein would have information not only available but easily accessible (RPG designers seriously need to learn to use marginalia to crossreference things). It would have digital assets available to drop major locations into a VTT as that is often what I'm using. It would also, and this is the hardest part, avoid design decisions I found inadequate (like an economy that made no sense, dungeons with no logical ecology, enemy fortresses with no beds or toilets).As for the actual "blank space" question, I'd say that with a sufficiently well thought out world I'm okay losing much of that authorial space for myself, but that I would want there to be the flexibility for players to feel comfortable making up the village or distant land they come from, or the obscure god they worship. It's one thing for the DM to decide they don't want to do their own worldbuilding, its another thing to cut everyone else off from those options.</blockquote>

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