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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4897210" data-attributes="member: 40961">I don't accept the analogy between the gameworld and the PCs such that the gameworld is the DM's PC and therefore the DM is entitled to absolute control over it.   1. The gameworld is much bigger than a single PC, both in imaginative scale and in table time.  2. A PC exists to a certain extent only as an interaction with the gameworld.  For example, it does you little good to imagine your character as an orphan raised by a circus if your DM declares to you that there are no such things as circuses. 3. No one games the way EW implies.  No one constantly asks permission for every action in order to avoid inadvertently "adding things" to the gameworld.  People make assumptions about the gameworld, do things, "add things" in this thread's parlance, and the DM flows with it, interrupting where he feels it important to do so.   To put it another way, lets say I decide that my character wants to give a coin to a beggar.  The DM hasn't expressly stated that there are any beggars, but I know I'm in a big town in a market place.  Without even thinking about it, I will likely assume that there is a beggar somewhere, and declare that I am giving a coin to him.  I have in essence added a beggar the the gameworld.  Now the DM would be entitled to declare an absence of beggars- maybe he's decided that this particular market is heavily patrolled by strict guards who eject the poor.  And that would be his business.  But most likely, in the typical game, the DM doesn't have an opinion on the subject and just rolls with it.  So I said I was giving a coin to a beggar- a beggar sounds like a plausible thing to be there, giving a coin to a beggar is something my character is capable of doing, so it just happens.   This isn't to say that the DM doesn't absolutely control the setting in the abstract sense, but it is to say that the DM doesn't spend all day miserly guarding every last shred of that control.  No one plays that way- EW has essentially constructed a straw person of his own opinion, in which every action requires express DM permission in case formerly unstated attributes of the gameworld would make that action impossible.  No one plays that way, instead the gameworld is jointly created with the DM exercising editorial control and veto power.</blockquote>

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