Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7100825" data-attributes="member: 42582">It depends on what the point of the map is, and how it is used.If the GM is using it as secret backstory to adjudicate action resolution, and if the players are meant to be using their skills together with their PC abilities to learn that secret backstory (this is how, eg, Moldvay Basic is played), then changing things is illusionism.If the GM is using the map basically as a sketch or prompt for narrating on the fly, and it is not a source of secret backstory used for adjudication purposes, then redrawing it on the fly is not illusionism. It's just establishing the shared fiction, and doing so while taking some inspiration from prior brainstorming (encoded in the map). Nothing is. I mean, unicorns are neither permanent nor impermanent, because they don't exist.In what you describe in the quote, there is no illusion. The GM is not tricking the players into thinking that their action declarations matter when they don't; or into thinking that s/he is using a fixed set of notes that the players can - through skilled play - try and disceren, when in fact s/he's not.When the players in my BW game describe their PCs going through Hardby's catacombs, and I narrate some colour in the course of that, no one thinks I'm reading from a fixed (or even unfixed) map, or that their job is to try and suss out that map. They know it all depends on their Catacombs-wise rolls.And here's another example which I've already posted upthread, but which you (and other posters) may have missed, as it didn't seem to get much response:My main 4e game is at 30th level. Which is to say, in mechanical terms the PCs have reached their peak, and in story terms that are at the culmination of their Epic Destinies.The main focus of the game has turned out to be this: Is the Dusk War upon us?The PCs (and the players) know that the Dusk War is prophesied, and that there are certain signs of its coming.One of these is that the Tarrasque will ravage the world. And when <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?490454-Session-report-reposted-PCs-stave-of-the-Dusk-War-by-negotiating-with-Yan-C-Bin-and-defeating-the-tarrasque" target="_blank">the Tarrasque entered the world and they confronted it</a>, they found it being warded by Maruts, who were there to meet an obligation to the Raven Queen to ensure that no one interfered with the Tarrasque's end-of-days ravagings.The PCs' response (which was chosen by the players) was that the Maruts had got their timing wrong - this was not the end-of-days ravaging of the Tarrasque, and hence not the one that the Maruts had to protect againsgt interferrence! And the PCs proved this to the Maruts by way of the ease with which one of their number was able to dispatch the Tarrasque near-singlehandedly: the tarrasque, at least on this occasion, could not be the harbinger of the end times whom the Maruts were contracted to protect, because it clearly lacked the capacity to ravage the world.This resembles the absence of a map in this way: there is no pre-established timeline. But it differs from the map example in this way: the temporal location of events is not mere colour (unlike whether the interesting place is down the left or the right tunnel), and so is not going to be settled just through framing narration: whether or not the period in which the game is taking place is the time of the Dusk War, or not, is going to be determined via play, that is, via the consequences that follow from action resolution.</blockquote>

Verification