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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6577095" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, I get all this, and described it upthread.But describing the aspiration doesn't answer my questions. (Compare: one person talks about using a trampoline to jump so high they can see the top of their house roof; another person says "Yeah, cool, but I'm going to do that to see the top of the Empire State Building!" It makes sense in the abstract, but what the hell does is their trampoline going to be made of?!)In Gygax's version, there are hard rules about how much time various activities take, how wandering monsters work, etc. Because of what I've called, upthread, the Spartan character of the gamworld, the aspiration is manageable.His game also includes a huge array of resources (detection spells, magic items etc) intended to let the players make rational choices about how they engage the geography. Plus there are conventions that make the model, like that monsters don't leave their lairs - so you can scout out the troll's location in session 1, leave the dungeon, spend money to buy oil, and then in session 2 go back and fight the troll.But when you (notionally) extend it to a whole world, which is itself on a GM-controlled timeline, and where there are no hard-and-fast rules to manage time as Gygax has for his dungeon, the players aren't any more pitting their wits against the GM. At best, they're making gambles about how the GM's secret timelline is going to unfold.It's a completely different gameplay.In a post below yours, [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] says "You can't have a codified system for eating lunch". Why not? We have codified procedures for how long it takes to find secret doors, for how long it takes to walk down a corridor, for how long it takes to cast a spell, for how frequently random orcs roam the corridors. We could have codified procedures for eating lunch. But we don't - and even if we did, there'd be something else that might come up that wouldn't be codified.Gygaxian D&D deals with this by shutting down the confines of the gameworld (to a dungeon), by stipulating conventions about the nature of said dungeons (challenge-ranked levels, static inhabitants of lairs, etc), by codifying the passage of time. As an approach to play, it really has very little in common with the players trying to beat a GM's secret timeline in circumstances where every determination about what is happening when, and how long an action takes, is in the hands of the GM.</blockquote>

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