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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7075303" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, but then so is a drawing of a carousel or of a Ferris wheel.When we move from visual similarity to actual representational function, the lines on the map don't represent trajectories or processes. The lines on a flowchart do. One can overlay lines with arrows on a map to depict the path one took; and make notes at various points on a map to record events that occurred at those places (and the same place might have multiple notes, if multiple noteworthy events occurred there over some period of time). A flowchart, serving a different representational function, isn't apt to have that sort of additional representation overlayed on it in the same way.There are certain ways of designing and GMing a dungeon that tend to push the map into being a flowchart. I seem to remember threads about this in the context of The Sunless Citadel, and contrasts being drawn with Jaquays-style maps. But even with a dungeon that is essentially a list of rooms that (given the design) can't but be encountered in sequence, there is still the option to retreat and try again. (I've seen plenty of published dungeon scenarios where this will break the module, in the sense that the GM now just has to make stuff up to keep the game going - but that's a further point.)I've already commented on the prison scenario upthread - the framing of the door as unable to be passed through in falcon form responds directly to (i) the player having failed a series of checks in relation to carrying the bodies through the city (failure results in a meeting with the watch) and trying to persuade the watch to help with this rather than treat it as a cause for suspicion (failure results in imprisonment), and (ii) the PC being able to cast Falconskin, such that a prison with holes a falcon might pass through wouldn't be a prison at all for that character.But here is another thing - an email received from the same player after the first session of that particular campaign, in which the PCs had their first encounter with the leader of the sorcerous cabal - which went badly because one of them (the mage PC) was carrying a cursed feather he'd bought in the Hardby marketplace - and subseqently broke into his tower and stole a spellbook from him:pretty cool how the world gets shaped by the character’s beliefs and instincts and the dice rolls! Just thinking through Jobe’s B’s and I’s and rolls … The feather existed because of its trait and hence X sold it. It was cursed because the aura reading failed. Jabal existed because we sought out a member of the cabal (affiliation). Athog gave us trouble because that circles test failed. Jabal lived in a tower because of an instinct about casting falcon skin if falling. I didn’t understand how those things worked until we did the session. If we had turned up with different characters, then I think the world would have been quite different too.Using the same sort of language: the door lacked falcon-sized exits because the PC can cast falconskin. If the player had turned up with a different character; or if the player's had succeeded at rather than failed various checks; then the "world" (ie the shared fiction) would have been quite different.That's a pretty clear explication of what I am trying to get at as a "player-driven" game. The fact that - as GM - I chose the dwelling place as a tower rather than (say) a house atop a cliff, with windows overlooking the ocean, is (from my point of view) a secondary consideration: the fact that there are multiple ways of narrating a world that is shaped by the choices the players have made doesn't change the fact that it is the players' choices that are driving the narration.</blockquote>

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