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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9663860" data-attributes="member: 29398">Well, for my part and in fairly general terms:"Plausible" implies a reasonably easy-to-follow (or in the case of hidden information revealed later, easy-to-explain) chain of events where one can be more or less expected to lead to the next.  It is, if not directly opposite to, certainly in conflict with contrivance; which often eschews plausibility in favour of plot.  Example: if Bob's character Kalvin was last seen kicking around several hundred in-fiction miles to the east with vague plans to head further east, plausibility makes it extremely unlikely Kalvin will be right here right now in the west where the other PCs are but contrivance puts him there anyway because Bob wants to bring Kalvin into the party.When imagining our worlds, plausible is another term for "what makes sense", and we probably all have different ideas of exactly what that would be in a given situation.  For example, the PCs kill the Emperor and then leave the realm to its own devices while they sail away somewhere else.What happens next?  What's plausible?  We could come up with dozens of different answers that are quite plausible, and thousands that aren't.  That the DM picks one of those plausible outcomes over the others is no big deal."Realism" can mean several things and I tend to interchange these meanings all the time: 1. mirroring the real world outright in the fiction (e.g. an in-game robin is exactly the same as a robin on Earth)2. in-fiction realism mirroring itself (or in other words, setting consistency)3. in combination, having bigger things (gravity, weather, astronomy, etc.) work as they do in the real world except where something fantastic specifically says they don't or can't."Objective" to me is another word for neutral or even dispassionate when applied to how a GM runs whatever game is being run.  No favouritism, no changing things just to thwart or suit one or more specific characters, no fudging, let the dice fall where they may, etc.For me the limit is the capacity of my brain and-or memory to store that information.  Ideally, I already know everything except that which is (or will be) affected by the PCs; in reality I only know some of it, hopefully enough to run the sessions without looking like too much of a fool.They don't differ much, and IMO both are very good maxims.When designing my current setting I think I spent maybe half an hour figuring out where the major mountain ranges would be and why they were there (i.e. the simplified plate tectonics involved) as opposed to somewhere else.  To me, compared to the amount of time I spent on the rest of the setting, half an hour is trivial; and now I have mountains that make sense.I did spend longer on climate patterns, but that's mostly because having nearly got them finished I realized I'd completely messed up enough of it that I basically had to start over; so that was most of an afternoon shot to hell.  And now I have weather that sort-of makes sense; the random element (that we don't have to worry about in reality) is all those high-level Druids casting weather-affecting spells and maybe upsetting patterns all over the place.Why did I do this?  Mostly because if these things don't make sense on someone else's map it annoys me to no end, and I'd rather not inflict that same annoyance on anyone else who thinks the same.  I've never met anyone annoyed that a map etc. is too realistic.</blockquote>

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