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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7077637" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, when I talk about a gameworld I'm talking primarily about the confines of a particular shared fiction. The game I was discussing with    [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] is not the first game I've run using GH as a setting, but I wouldn't expect stuff in this game to conform to details of what happened or was established in the prior games.That said, I don't think the demands are as great as (say) editing the FR, or the Marvel Universe. No single GM is going to run campaigns that touch on even a fraction of the detail published for FR (most of which is not the outcome of RPG play but of story writing). So maintaining the consistency of a setting over years of play with multiple groups - should one want to do that - is not on a par with managing the FR.Your claim about "defaults" is probably true as an empirical matter. But my post was not about what is common; it was about what is possible.In the game mentioned in the OP, at one point there was a confrontation (something of a foreshadowing of the decapitation in the tower bedroom) in the Hardby cathedral. The mage PC defeated the wizard/assassin, and took from her an artefact called Thelon's Orb, and hid it in the cathedral altar.Now I hadn't said anything about an altar. The player declared the action, and in the process made it true in the shared fiction that the cathedral contains an altar (and an altar in or under which a large-ish crystal can be hidden). Is that a threat to consistency?I don't think so. So much of what we do in fantasy RPGing rests on well-recognised tropes (including, eg, that cathedrals have high ceilings, altars, etc) that the player declaring that action reinforces the consistency and colour of the shared fiction.Likewise when - after that confrontation - the mage PC needed to find somewhere to rest and train for a few weeks. The player simply declared that his PC finds a cheap inn in the dive-y part of town. That doesn't threaten consistency - it reaffirms an existing shared picture of Hardby as a generic, all-purpose fantasy city (with catacombs, wizard towers, a cathedral, docks, etc). This is how Gygax first created the city and world of Greyhawk, after all; or what REH was doing with his "Hyborian Age".And if, by this sort of thing, the player actually puts something at stake, then as GM I have procedures to fall back on: instead of simply "saying 'yes'", I call for an appropriate check. This came up when the PCs drugged the wizard assassin and then set off, through the catacombs, to the mage's tower. I clarified that there was not something I was missing in the fiction that would make it easy for the PCs to navigate easily through the catacombs to find a way into the tower; the players clarified for me that there was not. So - given that something most definitely was at stake (their ability to get to the tower before the wizard/assassin woke up) - I called for a Catacombs-wise check. Which failed. And so the wizard/assassin woke up as they wandered, lost, through the catacombs; and then, came across them as she made her own way to the tower, taunting them through an opening into the catacombs and sewers from the street; and then the race was on. (The PCs lost - hence the decapitation mentioned in the OP.)I just don't see that, or how, this sort of role for the players is at odds with consistency.EDIT: I read   [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s post not far upthread and some of it is relevant to this reply. So here's a length addition to the post:This is true for my games.In our main 4e game, all the Prime Material Plane action has taken place on the map on the inside cover of Night's Dark Terror - something like a 100 mile x 200 mile area.The details of the cosmology have been drawn from an interaction between published sources and play. The fact that the Raven Queen aspires to be the sole god of the cosmos is an example of something established through play, the culmination of that being my narration of her Mausoleum, which was something that I (as GM) authored in the course of play:The map I had drawn in advance. The details of the murals and statutes, the vision in the pool, the details about the names on the wall - all that, and hence what it implies about the Raven Queen, was authored by me in the course of play, building on what had been established already in the campaign, and extrapolating it in such a way as to maintain and build the pressure on the players to make hard choices for their PCs (ie about their attitude towards the Raven Queen's rise-and-rise-and-rise).Yep, this.The details of dwarven society in our 4e game were authored by the player of the dwarf PC, as part of his backstory. The existence of a drow secret society of Corellon worshippers, hoping to free the drow from Lolth's rule so that they can return to the surface world and undo the sundering of the elves, was established by the player of the drow PC, initially in backstory and then developed over the course of the campaign.The player of the invoker/wizard will often explain ingame phenomena that have become salient in the course of play by reference to his conception of how magic, the cosmology etc work. Sometimes this is just colour, and so just stands as he narrates it, adding to the collective experience of the game. Sometimes it is more than just colour. On those occasions, it may lay the groundwork for some permissible action declaration. Sometimes I just "say 'yes'" to this. If it needs to be massaged a bit to fit with something already established, I might work with the player to do this. If it looks like it is the player trying to narrate his PC into a free lunch, I might require a check to see if things really work as the PC thinks (although, since reaching epic tier, most of those checks are auto-successes for this PC!).In my previous long-running campaign, the player of the lead samurai established details around his family and their loyalties; the player of the animal spirit exiled to earth helped contribute details about the animal courts of heaven; etc.Of all the ways of approaching worldbuilding that   [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] mentions, this one comes closest to what I would regard as common sense.I would agree that the setting is a means to an end, but in our games sometimes that end is exploring the characters, but not always. In our main 4e game, it is about the reconciliation (if that is possible) of structure and "life"/"impulse"/"chaos". In this context we have a PC remaking the Rod of Seven Parts; a couple of Raven Queen (ie fate/death) cultists; an elemental-type sorcerer who wants to reconcile the primordials with the endurance of the created world as something distinct from the order of heaven; and an eternal defender who is also god of imprisonment, who wants to preserve the world from primordials trying to unleash the Dusk War but in doing so doesn't just want to hand it over to the rule of the Raven Queen.These characters don't have a lot of personal depth independently of these bigger picture commitments (outside of the standard quirks of colour etc that come with most RPGing); but the setting is a vehicle for exploring/resolving this question. It would be disastrous if it had the answer already written into it! (Eg via GM-authored metaplot.)This is the second "epic" cosmological game I've run - the previous, OA one turned on the relationship between human affairs - insignificant as they might seem from the divine point of view - and the laws, including the dubious compromises they contain, established by heaven to govern the world. Being an OA game, various and sometimes competing notions of "karma", "enlightenment" etc played a role in framing these issues. The PCs defied heaven, forming alliances with a dead and an exiled god, and ended up succeeding in saving humanity where heaven - due to its compromises - had failed.This game was run using Rolemaster. It had more depth of personality to the PCs than the 4e one; but RM in many ways it a bit less robust at the moment of crunch. The PCs ultimate victory turned more heavily than (say) 4e does on the players making a strong case as to what their PCs could achieve given fictional positioning, with the role of mechanics not then being irrelevant, but a bit more secondary. While I still think RM is a system that is often unfairly maligned, and has a lot of good things about it, this campaign persuaded me that I wouldn't want to run it again for the sort of RPGing I'm interested in. It puts a lot of "free kriegsspiel"-type pressure on the GM, moreso than the systems I'm now using.In this game, too, the idea of baking the outcome into the GM narration of setting - so changing the game from the form it took, to a type of puzzle- or mystery-focused game - would have been utterly disastrous.So these are examples which (I think) show how setting can be a means to an end even when that end is as much about what is possible within the setting, and the meaning of events in the setting, rather than about the characters.Interesting. This is not a big part of our approach - or, at least, maybe we approach it in a different way. This is the sort of thing that we would tend to work out in the course of framing and establishing the content of an action declaration (establishing authenticity; clarifying the situation).Elaborating on that: framing and action declaration are definitely not 1st person narration moments at our table. The discussion moves very flexibly between first person, second person (GM addressing player/PC as "you"), third person but character focused (eg "Jobe is trying to . . . "; "How does that relate to Jobe's Belief that . . . ?"; etc), and god's-eye-view third person.</blockquote>

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