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<blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5406213" data-attributes="member: 80487">You must be LOOKING at the entire world at once, which is possible only from a great remove.Zoom in from that outer-space perspective, and guess what? There are more details. You have got to do that if you are going actually to play!In actual play, nobody is &quot;doing the entire world at once&quot;. Some people might be doing nothing but following rigid instructions, but if so then they are just being poor substitutes for computers.The universe is close enough to infinite in all directions -- including &quot;down&quot; to the smaller and &quot;in&quot; to the more subtle -- that there is &quot;an entire world&quot; in each moment.It is rather to the point of having players that they are not perfectly predictable. There is no telling where they may turn their attention, and wherever that may be, the GM must provide something; verisimilitude abhors a vacuum.A scenario in which &quot;the world does nothing and the NPCs are all nameless and faceless with no motivation&quot; can be a flat-out &quot;railroad&quot;.More commonly, we can have photo-realistic manikins with all the depth of cardboard cutouts, in a Potemkin Village in the Twilight Zone. Get out of town? You can't get out of town!That can be very interesting if it's just one layer of the onion, as for instance in the movies &quot;Dark City&quot;, &quot;The Truman Show&quot; and &quot;The Matrix&quot;. It can be a pain in neck, though, if there really is &quot;no there there&quot; at all.Most commonly of all, it doesn't matter how shallow the stage set is. It serves for just one scene along the plot line, and the director will be moving the players along to the next set before the paint is dry.The big deal of course is that it is supposed to be frozen in a certain state until Chapter X. Players are not allowed to change it away from the plot line.The actual game in a plotted scenario occurs within the boundaries of those chapters. The &quot;space between&quot; those borders is effectively a non-game-play domain.So, what we have is actually a sequence of discrete games. The designers of 4e take that right down to the &quot;encounter&quot;, which has a beginning and an end, victory conditions, and -- a bit of innovation in the game system -- more of its own independent balance than in old D&amp;D games.The free campaign is less like boxes and more like streams.I am not very familiar with MMORPGs, and certainly computerization can call for different approaches. I suspect, though, that to some degree the model of streams across terrain is not just more fun for (some) players but inherently more practical logistically when you have a large number of players interacting in a continually updated &quot;shared world&quot;.That point may be not only hard to appreciate but personally moot if your RPG experience is entirely with &quot;campaigns&quot; that consist of the same few people moving the same few characters in a single group across a map that's discarded after just a couple of years.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ariosto, post: 5406213, member: 80487"] You must be LOOKING at the entire world at once, which is possible only from a great remove. Zoom in from that outer-space perspective, and guess what? There are more details. You have [I]got[/I] to do that if you are going actually to play! In actual play, nobody is "doing the entire world at once". Some people might be doing nothing but following rigid instructions, but if so then they are just being poor substitutes for computers. The universe is close enough to infinite in all directions -- including "down" to the smaller and "in" to the more subtle -- that there is "an entire world" in each moment. It is rather to the point of having players that they are not perfectly predictable. There is no telling where they may turn their attention, and wherever that may be, the GM must provide [I]something[/I]; verisimilitude abhors a vacuum. A scenario in which "the world does nothing and the NPCs are all nameless and faceless with no motivation" can be a flat-out "railroad". More commonly, we can have photo-realistic manikins with all the depth of cardboard cutouts, in a Potemkin Village in the Twilight Zone. Get out of town? You [I]can't[/I] get out of town! That can be very interesting if it's just one layer of the onion, as for instance in the movies "Dark City", "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix". It can be a pain in neck, though, if there really is "no there there" at all. Most commonly of all, it doesn't matter how shallow the stage set is. It serves for just one scene along the plot line, and the director will be moving the players along to the next set before the paint is dry. The big deal of course is that it is [I]supposed[/I] to be frozen in a certain state until Chapter X. Players are not [I]allowed[/I] to change it away from the plot line. The actual [I]game[/I] in a plotted scenario occurs within the boundaries of those chapters. The "space between" those borders is effectively a non-game-play domain. So, what we have is actually a sequence of discrete games. The designers of 4e take that right down to the "encounter", which has a beginning and an end, victory conditions, and -- a bit of innovation in the game system -- more of its own independent [I]balance[/I] than in old D&D games. The free campaign is less like boxes and more like streams. I am not very familiar with MMORPGs, and certainly computerization can call for different approaches. I suspect, though, that to some degree the model of streams across terrain is not just more fun for (some) players but inherently [I]more practical logistically[/I] when you have a large number of players interacting in a continually updated "shared world". That point may be not only hard to appreciate but personally moot if your RPG experience is entirely with "campaigns" that consist of the same few people moving the same few characters in a single group across a map that's discarded after just a couple of years. [/QUOTE]

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