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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8330034" data-attributes="member: 42582">I look at the role of setting in RPGing very differently.I don't think that a setting becomes more consistent, or more engaging, in virtue of being prepared, or containing a lot of detail-known-only-to-the-GM. There is no need for a detailed world to provide a base for consistent scenes and encounters. Virtually any two scenes or encounters can be consistent with one another - or to put it another way, there are very few scenes or encounters that are mutually inconsistent or contradictory - and so the setting can be allowed to be whatever one might extrapolate to from what has actually taken place in play. Things happening irrespective of what the PCs are doing can be similarly handled. These can be narrated as consequences in the course of action resolution. Having a list prepared in advance might help from the point of view of being an aide-memoire, but it doesn't need to be framed as a calendar in the style of LotR Appendix B.The idea that players will work for discovery of the world the GM has built, such that these discoveries are rewards; and that the measure of "something big" is that it changes the natural = GM-pre-authored flow of events; is also very different from how I think of RPGing. I take it as given that the players, via the actions they declare for their PCs, will affect the content of the shared fiction. That seems to me to be the main reason for playing a RPG, and the role of worldbuilding is in facilitation of this. Your framing seems to get the priorities exactly reversed.</blockquote>

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