D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Lanefan]

Well, let's see.

I explained a thing which is lost by having the GM sew up every single detail of the world before the players ever arrive, an aspect of player agency.

I specified that there really is a value--flexibility, discoverability, authenticity to the IRL cultural experience of pre-modern civilizations--to having a world where, within a certain boundary things are well-defined, probably quite a large boundary, but beyond that boundary, it becomes "HIC SVNT DRACONES", terra incognita. Not only does this add more similarity to what was in fact true (of medieval culture, naturally) in our real world, it ensures that the GM has an important tool for addressing problems that might come up: the freedom to build (not just randomly conjure up, but actually invest effort to create) new elements of the world.

This is something genuinely valuable, even by the lens of verisimilitude, in addition to benefits on perpendicular axes of useful GMing tools and other things.

With this, I agree.

But I'm not sure of its relevance to player agency.

None of this has anything to do with forcing GMs to do anything. Instead, it is about keeping options open.

If all you're suggesting is that the GM keep parts of the map blank for later infill as ideas occur and the campaign expands, that's great advice. All for it!

If, however, there's a secondary motive of having those blank areas be how-where you-as-player can try to introduce elements not otherwise present in the campaign (e.g. "There's no Tieflings in this part of the world, but there could be in that blank area; so why can't I play one who has made the journey from there to here?") then I stop listening real fast.

 

[pemerton]

Pemerton, in this thread, is a great example - He outright admits that he has only a duffer's understanding of Special Relativity, and no understanding at all of General Relativity. And, quite predictably, in his very first consideration of the issue, he steps right into a hole.

What hole?

 

[TwoSix]

What hole?

A black hole?

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, that makes sense.

In this case, the village was ruined and all the relevant NPCs were dead or gone, so it's not the kind of thing the GM had prepared, nor were the exact details of what happened likely to be relevant in the future so it largely boiled down to colour.

The bolded is a big factor here.

The problem with making a bunch of stuff up on the fly is that if-when that stuff does become relevant a few real-world years later, nobody remembers it properly. And while some of us keep game logs, keeping them to that degree of detail is a) too much work at the time and b) too difficult to parse through later to find whatever info it is you're looking for.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"This is a thing that people get paid a lot of money to do professionally, and I have not been involved with that profession," would be a clue.

"This is a thing covered in graduate level classes in university, and I didn't even take bachelor's level courses in the subject," would be another clue.

"I read up in wikipedia on it," would be a third clue.

The answer to, "Am I likely to be in the Dunning-Kruger Club on this topic?" would also give you an indication.

Pemerton, in this thread, is a great example - He outright admits that he has only a duffer's understanding of Special Relativity, and no understanding at all of General Relativity. And, quite predictably, in his very first consideration of the issue, he steps right into a hole.

The problem with that is most stardrives have to discard parts of Relativity in the first place to work at all, so its not clear how absolutely useful a deep understanding there is.

 

[pemerton]

A black hole?

Here's my first consideration of the subject:

The same thing comes up in a sci-fir RPG. What happens if two PCs sit down to explain the special relativity thought experiments to one another, while travelling in their FTL space ship that accelerated from "stationary" to its current speed?

 

[Thomas Shey]

The GM makes up details all the time in play. They have to, because no model is completely perfect in every detail, and nobody thinks of everything. If the players want to do so, they can make suggestions that the GM can use, or not, as they see fit.

That's kind of dodging the issue; if the players are adding things midplay its nonsensical to talk about them warping reality; they're operating on a level where the reality is being warped all the time. You can talk about characters doing that, but talking about players doing that, especially when they're not changing anything already extent, makes no sense. At that point your objection is to the change in player/GM role, it has nothing to do with "warping reality".

 

[TwoSix]

The bolded is a big factor here.

The problem with making a bunch of stuff up on the fly is that if-when that stuff does become relevant a few real-world years later, nobody remembers it properly. And while some of us keep game logs, keeping them to that degree of detail is a) too much work at the time and b) too difficult to parse through later to find whatever info it is you're looking for.

If nobody remembers well enough to contradict what’s happening now, than what happened a year ago isn’t really relevant.

 

[Don Durito]

I think that whether you feel that something is satisfactorily simulated, overly abstracted(not simulated enough), or overly simulated is going to be a personal thing. A single given instance of simulation might be all three of those to three different people.

Eh. It might be subjective but it's not arbritrary. People generally have commonalities in their experiences.

 

[SkidAce]

Why wouldn't players be perfectly interchangeable widgets to the "traditional GM"? They don't want any contributions except character actions.

I would never have come up with this phrasing myself, but--yeah, this is precisely the problem I have. With all of the emphasis on "absolute power", on GM vision, on it being "my campaign" from that GM's perspective, the bottomless dismissiveness for the very concept of player contribution outside of character actions? As far as I can tell, to the "traditional GM", the players are perfectly interchangeable widgets.

They just happen to be the particular perfectly interchangeable widgets which coincidentally ended up experiencing that campaign.

My friends are not interchangeable widgets.