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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gimby" data-source="post: 9672668" data-attributes="member: 49875">To give a simple example of the potential conflict between prep and agency I'd like to offer an encounter from a recent 5e game.The PCs were hunting for an item that they believed was in the lair of a giant dinosaur type beast.  They had been beaten to it by a rival NPC group who had slain the beast.  They therefore came upon the carcass of the beast being scavenged by some other powerful bird monsters. The terrain was generally some fairly broken scrubland with good potential lines of sight.I prepared a gridded battlemap about 50 or so yards across and seeded it with a bunch of things to interact with, cover, terrain features,  other minor critters to avoid/deliberately spook, that sort of thing. Everything outside this 250 square yard area is by necessity far less detailed- the same sorts of features but with much less understanding of the spatial relationships between features. While clearly as the GM I've defined all of the world,  by presenting the map the players now have a small area of the fictional space they can interact with without requiring constant negotiation- they can act against the known geography using their own understanding of their character capabilities.So here is the tension - within this detailed area the players can act with confidence and have lots of ways to interact with the environment.  But I as GM have decided its location and properties.  Outside of it they have more freedom to move, but every movement is a negotiation where my imagining of the scene is paramount.  There's also some social pressure to make use of the maps and so on that the GM has clearly put a lot of effort into.So by this form of prep and committing to a geography I offer the players the information they need to make informed choices and the opportunity to make use of terrain features but cost them the ability to choose their ground and have those advantages. Essentially as we cannot detail all parts of a game world at the highest level of fidelity,  by preparing parts at a higher level we risk biasing the game to those parts we have prepared heavily.  Its just worth being clear eyed about the costs and benefits of different kinds of prep.Note that isn't a battlemap/totm (jargon!) division- it could equally have been a much larger grid map with one more detailed section on it or two totm regions, one thinly described, one richly described.</blockquote>

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