The thought experiment my question is intended to guide toward is this
- I could begin with a pre-authored game-world, such as Stonetop, that I count vivid and inhabitable
- In an alternative world, I could begin with a tabula-rasa, and my group will author our game-world on the fly. Here I mean tabula-rasa with utmost sincerity! No sneaking in of any preliminary sketches. Nothing about the world is pre-authored. It is perforce the case that no adjectives can be reliably assigned to it by me, thus inviting each reader to make their own judgement (as you do.)
These are dichotomous so that there is no world in which it is possible for me to begin with both a pre-authored game-world
and a tabula-rasa at the same time. I could begin with those things at different times, or with different groups, but that is to invent a different thought-experiment and abandon the one I proposed.
My question proposes resisting that dichotomy. If we were to avoid either extreme, to find a
balance, where might that lie? Can there be some pre-authoring mixed with some authoring-on-the-fly? Might it matter who does the pre-authoring in those respective timeframes? Is any amount of pre-authoring - even an iota - a curse? Or is there a way to grasp the pre-authored game-world that dissolves the tension - so that we need not choose a point on a line, but make decisions about each independently? All of these thoughts and others like them are intended to be invited by my question.
While your 2 points above are a dichotomy, (1) is not an extreme; it's a spectrum. The point opposite (2) would be a pre-authored game-world in which all details and the story were fully specified and play would have no effect. That is, (1) is already the area where you can find or create balance.
As for where that might lie, you've left out the thing that matters—which is,
what matters to the players (including the GM). What issues do they want to explore? That's where you leave the blanks. Or make or find them, if using pre-authored material, by deliberate editing or seeking areas that haven't been fleshed out. Detail the rest in advance as much as you like—or fill that in during play too, since it
doesn't matter so much. Unless the point of play is to experience a detailed world, rather than explore values in tension/conflict.... Or perhaps you want to do both! It's possible to have both, without Edwards's dreaded incoherence, as long as you're clear about what you're doing, when.
Any pre-established info is both blessing and curse, in that it provides a necessary departure point for exploration (you gotta start
somewhere), but, since it's where you start, also discourages exploration (since you're already there). But there's more kinds of exploration than trekking to unknown lands, of course. The metaphor is unfortunately liable to taken as literal geography, so I'll clarify that this info could be about characters in the world, or factions, or social phenomena, ethics, and the like.
What you dig into here is close to what I am asking. Is Edwards right? So that Stonetop's - 229 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting is indeed an irredeemable curse!? (There is a technical detail here as to the game texts that I am glossing over, and will get into if necessary.)
Edwards will Edwards—that is, make a dynamic tension into a do-or-die binary. I haven't read Stonetop's setting either, but I have read Over the Edge, and its setting is chock-full of the very stuff I as a more Story Now-oriented player might be expecting to generate and explore through play. NPCs and factions and plots are presented, named, and given gobs of detail about who they are, what they're up to, and how they're entangled with others. So in that particular case, I would say that most of OTE's setting gets in the way—particuarly because it's so interwoven and tangled (by design!) that it would be hard to remove anything in order to create blanks, and it would be hard to insert anything new without massive editing of many factions, NPCs, plots, etc. (Notably, however, OTE describes things as they are and where they're headed, but leaves it very much open as to how the PCs might muck with that.)
Now, I am familiar with Doskvol from Blades in the Dark, and that setting, although not 229 pages, is fairly detailed in some senses, but it leaves so much obvious open space that players and GM can grab onto a random named NPC/faction/location and run with it, because most often all a given element has is its name and a few key facts (is a noble vampire, has sway over a given neighborhood, is where the rich folk live). What setting is provided is not meant to be experienced, but built on, in play.
Tweet's caveats might discount any characterisation of his world-text as "canonical", but Edwards seems skeptical that there can be any value in pre-authored material such as Stonetop's 229 pages at all (canonical or otherwise). Strandberg has wasted his time, or even worse, cursed others with a ball-and-chain around their necks. Nothing in what Edwards says here lets in the possibility of unique answers for individual groups of RPGers.
He did like to take an extreme position, didn't he?
But as you say, there really isn't likely to be one answer that applies to all, at all times. My question doesn't demand one. My question is - sincerely - a question. It suggests that there could possibly be a balance between pre-authorship and player-authorship-on-the-fly, and asks where each reader feels that balance lies for them between pre-authored world and authorship-on-the-fly? Do they genuinely feel the greatest benefit in proceeding from tabula-rasa, or do they benefit from some preliminary sketches?
"Balance" more often than not implies a stable state. But there is a dynamic tension between prior detail and open field. You can view it as a tug-of-war or a necessary tensile strength to hold a structure together, but because the thing in question is an RPG, things will be changing, and the open field of the moment becomes prior detail as soon as anything is established. As for the questions, well, that depends on the folks at the table! How much of their limited play time do they want to spend having stuff revealed to them, vs. generating it on the fly?
As an aside, I have run a few actual tabula-rasa freeform RPGs. Someone always has to open with something. Typically me
Like I said, you gotta start
somewhere. And folks might not even show up unless they know what that somewhere is (genre, premise, hook, etc.).
My question is intended to imply skepticism about the dichotomy I first put in mind. I suggest that there can be a balance - some of each. That turns not on the question of what adjectives might be applied to authored-on-the-fly game-worlds (that's up to each reader) but whether a dichotomy is forced upon us at all, and relatedly what value (or values, at different times) could inform choices about how much of each we best benefit from (which must be contextualised in our criteria for counts-as-a-benefit which as you imply will vary.)
I argue that it isn't a dichotomy. Or rather the dichotomy isn't in pre-authored/on-the-fly setting/world, but in specifically
what in the world is pre-authored vs. on-the-fly.