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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5636587" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you describe here seems more like a situation where PCs can't be wizards. Which is quite conceivable (eg for a Conan game).If you are saying that the PC is a wizard, but for some reason can't do what every other apprentice wizard can do, then the problem seems to me to be not one of dissociation, but a more basic one of coherence, or at least of verisimilitude.The sorts of balance constraints on PCs I had in mind (and that I assumed Yesway Jose had in mind) tend to concern esoterica rather than bread-and-butter capabilities, precisely because coherence and verisimilitude already sort out the bread-and-butter questions.<a href="http://inky.org/rpg/no-myth.html" target="_blank">No myth</a> is one way to do it - which has also been labelled "just in time" GMing in some other threads on these boards.For the PCs to have a place to act, it's not essential to have anything more than a description of where they are and who they can see, plus some shared understanding between players and GM of background and genre. The gameworld then gets built out of the material of actual play. Its sort of the opposite of a module which has paragraphs of backstory for the GM to read that never comes into the open when the players actually take their PCs through the adventure.I don't run an entirely no myth game, but I suspect that by ENworld standards I'm closer to it than many.A similar sort of approach to the prioritising of character and situation over world building is implicit in this <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=1361.0" target="_blank">comment by Paul Czege</a>:I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out. . . when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. . .  the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.I'm not saying that there is anything better about GMing in this sort of fashion. I just offer it as an answer to the question - how can you have one (character) without the other (setting) at the points where they interact?I also think it's fairly evident that some action resolution systems support no myth or situation-driven play, in which the prior development of setting takes a back seat to character and situation, better than others.For example, the more the action resolution mechanics require the players to focus on the minutiae of the gameworld, and discourage the players from allowing one scene to be wrapped up and another scene framed (eg because there are potential mechanical advantages to be gained by keeping the scene alive), the harder it will be to run no myth. An example of this would be dungeon exploration in classic D&D - the mechanics for that are 10' poles, ear trumpets with wire mesh, standard door opening procedures, etc, all of which (i) encourage the players to engage with the minutiae of the dungeon setting, and (ii) can't be fairly adjudicated by a GM who doesn't already know the architectural and other details of the dungeon, and (iii) tend to lead to play of the sort being described in the various recent ToH threads, focusing on operational exploration rather than engaging with situation (the module becomes, in effect, one long scene).4e's mechanics offer better support for no myth or situation-focused play, because the action resolution mechanics- both combat and skill challenges, and also including the resource recovery elements of these mechanics - tend to encourage scene-based play rather than a one contious scene approach. To really run 4e this way, though, you need to go beyond the core rulebooks and bring in approaches and techniques from other games - such as the [utl=http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/187_Save_My_Game.pdf]Save My Game article[/url] which promoted Burning Wheel-style "Let it Ride".</blockquote>

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