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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7057588" data-attributes="member: 42582">Which it was. Something-or-other made the brother evil; this made him a fit object for possession; hence he became possessed, once his failed spell casting opened the magical channel to make this possible.Again, you seem to be confused between the time sequence in the imaginary world, and the time sequence in the real world. As any number of examples reveal (including the Great Expectations one that I mentioned), the time sequence of authorship of episodes in the real world, and the time sequence of events in an imaginary world that are depicted or recounted in those episodes, are not in general correlated.I've got shelves full of setting books, and (virtual) pages of actual play reports, that disagree with you here. I can (and have) pointed to the moments in play where certain imaginary events becomes elements of the shared fiction.Correct. That doesn't sound like a RPG to me. For instance, it doesn't have the element of "PC inhabitation" that is pretty central to most RPGing.But that is not the only way to collectively author a fiction. (As the actual practice of RPGing shows.)That's not true as a general proposition. For instance, it was very common in the early days of D&D play for the referee to roll the treasure after the encounter was resolved. (The original Empire of the Petal Throne rulebook canvasses this sort of procedure, for instance.)In the AD&D books Gygax encourages the referee to roll in advance, but not in order to preserve "linear-time causal reality" but in order to eliminate head-scratchers like "Why didn't the orcs use the sword +1 that was just rolled up?"The technique of starting a campaign small, with a single village or dungeon or whatever, and then constructing the gameworld - both geographically and historically - around that continues to be pretty standard, I think, and clearly that does not conform to your stated account of how RPGing works.Finding out what unfolds from a given starting point is one way of RPGing, but has never been the only way and I'm not even sure it has ever been the dominant way.</blockquote>

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