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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6576863" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, hark back to 1974. E. Gary Gygax would sit at his desk and precisely map out dungeon levels including all sorts of tricks and puzzles and whatnot, and then his friends would come over and try to dope out how to traverse said dungeon levels and survive. THAT is the model, it hasn't changed since 1974! You PRECISELY map out the world to such an extent that anyone could look at your notes and maps and objectively judge how the actions of the characters will play out. There may be judgment involved, there may be matters of DMs simply keeping stuff in their heads or not writing it up sufficiently to meet that ideal, but the dungeon 'objectively exists' (albeit as a piece of paper). The agenda represented by [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] AFAICT and as I've experienced this in the past with players with his tastes is to simply extend that process TO THE WHOLE WORLD and create an entire game world in which every single little thing is specified down to a sufficient level to allow objective judgment of the outcomes of at least a reasonably anticipated subset of all the possible actions players could have their characters take.This is what they mean by 'objective'. It isn't even NECESSARILY simulationist, though it tends to be because then you can rely on people to judge things by real-world common sense standards. Its a lot easier to all agree that yes indeed Joe the Barbarian can leap the 20' chasm on a 12 because he's got a STR of 18 and the world record for a running longjump is 29' than it is to judge if Cuchulain was able to leap the 100' chasm because who knows what a fantastic hero can do? In any case, that's how it works, and in this world view the DM is arbitrating the hostile world and the characters conquest/exploration of it. Any changes made to the world during the course of that interaction is cheating. Every dice roll must be taken as rolled, every monster and trap must be in the originally specified location and work as indicated by the DM beforehand. Your timeline which works 'at the speed of plot' fails to be 'objective' because you can't ground the whole thing in cause-and-effect game world events. The PCs aren't in time because of the amount of time that it took them to traverse the distance to the temple was identical to the time it took the cultists to prepare. If you specified things that way, then any delay would make the party too late, and any early arrival would be premature. The DM is still free to arrange the elements of the world such as to create drama, but only in a 'realistic' fashion. I think the attraction was that the GM can then be seen as an opponent, or at least that the WORLD is an opponent, a puzzle to be overcome by cleverness. If the world is arranged on plot needs then its not an antagonist, its simply the stage.</blockquote>

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