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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9216996" data-attributes="member: 42582">The following quote is from Gygax's DMG, published in 1979, p 93, under the heading "Territory Development by Player Characters":Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town, choosing an area of wooded hills as the general site. He then asks you if there is a place where he can build a small concentric castle on a high bluff overlooking a rive. Unless this is totally foreign to the area, you inform him that he can do so.In other words, within the first 5 years of what is now a 50 year old hobby, one of its founders had worked that, in practical terms, the GM cannot maintain the "board state" in a manner that is comparable to a game of chess (be that ordinary chess or blindfold chess).Or consider this, from Classic Traveller (1977, so within 3 years of the publication of the original D&D game) - the rule for the Streetwise skill (Book 1, p 15):The referee should set the throw required to obtain any item specified by the players (for example, the name of an official willing to issue licenses without hassle = 5+, the location of high quality guns at a low price = 9+). DMs based on streetwise should be allowed at +1 per level. No expertise DM =-5.The same page also states the fictional context that underpins this rule:The individual [with Streetwise skill] is acquainted with the ways of local subcultures (which tend to be the same everywhere in human society), and thus is capable of dealing with strangers without alienating them. (This is not to be considered the same as alien contact, although the referee may so allow.) Close-knit sub-cultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, and trade groups such as workers, the underworld, etc) generally reject contact with strangers or unknown elements. Streetwise expertise allows contact for the purposes of obtaining information, hiring persons, purchasing contraband or stolen goods, etc.These designers had worked out (i) that what drives the play of these games, and makes them distinctive, is the role of shared fiction, and (ii) that the players will always come up with ideas about what the fiction might (or might not) include which cannot simply be read off the GM's map-and-key.And that's before we even get to action resolution which takes the setting and its elements as fixed, but still requires reconciliation of the player's and the GM's proposals as to what might happen next (such as the example of climbing the wall).</blockquote>

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