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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9845598" data-attributes="member: 42582">By "internal consistency", you seem to mean something like "has a uniformity of trope and tone". Not a property of the fiction from the fiction's perspective, but of the fiction from an audience's perspective.You also seem to be assuming that RPGing involves "an (or the) adventure".The whole sense if get from your accounts of consistency in fiction and its relationship to play is of an early-to-mid 90s TSR setting and its associated modules.I don't think that's common sense at all. I engage with a lot of people having to write things. (University students.) Many of them struggle to remain consistent across a 1500 word paper where they have a strong incentive -namely, the grade that will end up on their transcript of results - to do a good job. I don't have any reason to think they would do a better job across a more sprawling set of compositions where nothing more is at stake than the playing of a hobby game.It's not about having experienced it in the real world. For me, it's about the difference between contrived fiction, and what one encounters in the real world: which is the product not of rational authorship but of uncountably many decisions and causal influences, operating iteratively and reflexively, and involving multiple path dependencies.You mention buildings. I live in a suburb where the oldest buildings were built around about 170 years ago; where the biggest public building is a town hall built about 140 years ago; where there are apartment blocks whose construction finished last year; and nearly everything in between. What would count as consistency or inconsistency in describing a building? I mean, if a GM were to narrate a low rise art deco building where part of the brick exterior has been replaced by a concrete wall with a corrugated steel roller-door in it, would that be out of place? Probably not. if the GM were to narrate a stairway to nowhere in the public building, that would not be out of place at all, because I've seen that stairway! (Obviously it once went somewhere, but in 140 years a building can undergo a lot of internal change.)Or music. The last time I was in East Africa, a friend was taking me through examples of popular music from different parts of Africa. They at least asserted to be able to tell (say) Nigerian from Congolese music. I don't know how well they would do in a blind test, but I know that based on what they played for me I would have no chance. My partner can often tell British from American hip hop by the sound, or by the first 30 seconds of a music video; I can't. But the "often" is deliberate - I've seen her be wrong. I can tell you, with confidence, that there is something distinctive about classic (mid-70s to mid-/late-80s Aussie rock - but I couldn't describe it accurately, and don't purport to be able to recognise even the most obscure example of it from, say, an opening guitar riff.These things are so subtle, so intricate. The idea that a GM can write 200 pages of notes that convey a consistent, coherent culture isn't something I've ever encountered.What I've experienced, when it comes to RPG settings, is 200 pages of tropes or motifs, that get deployed to convey some fictional fact like now you're in this place. A bit like how Chris Claremont conveys that Colossus is Russian by having him exclaim "Lenin's ghost!" or call his friend "tovarishch". Or how a certain sort of British drama will always film in the street where the mid-to-late 19th century terraces are still all there.I find this a little condescending. I, and the other posters who you're engaging with, are not colleagues who have come to you for advice because we're puzzled about why our lessons - or gaming sessions - don't work out as we hoped.</blockquote>

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