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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6398061" data-attributes="member: 42582">If they are essentially procedural goals, where the motivation behind doing them is to find out whether or not they can be done, then yes, they are gaining knowledge about the shared fiction.There is a degree of paradox in gaining knowledge of something by authoring it, but that's why content-generation procedures become very important in this sort of play. One well-known procedure, of course, is strong GM authority, which means that the GM is not exploring but narrating, but the players explore, learning what the GM authors.The things you describe could be different from setting exploration, but as you present them they don't have that: they don't raise any issues of real-world value/signficance other than curiosity as to how it unfolds.By fidelity I'm not meaning fidelity to external canon (though I'm sure for some groups that's very important) but fidelity to what's gone before.You see this every time a poster talks about a "living, breathing world" or "the GM should play the NPCs in accordance with what they would sensibly do" or "I have a timeline that dictates how things will unfold if the PCs don't interfere".The setting serves another purpose other than satisfying curiosity. I posted an example upthread with reference to Bladerunner.In RPGing, then, the move from setting exploration as a priority to somethinge else (I'm hesitant to call it the opposite) is using story elements to generate real-world conflicts of value/matters of significance. Luke Crane gives a nice example in the BW rulebook:If one of your relationships is your wife in the village . . . [then i]f you're hunting a vampyr, of course it's your wife who is his victim!This example, taken literally, trades on a mechanic that BW has and D&D (other than perhaps some 5e backgrounds, depending on how some of the background features are interpreted) doesn't: players building relationships into their PCs as part of character build.But the same thing can be done in D&D on an informal basis. For instance, at the start of my 4e campaign I instructed each player to specify one object of PC loyalty. On this approach, to some extent the content of the fiction is already known, to the players as well as the GM. The GM's techniques of content-introduction become quite different (eg, as per Luke Crane, the victim will be the wife; or, in an example you've probably seen me use before, if the PC is a paladin of the Raven Queen then the "abandoned" tomb will contain skulking cultists of Orcus, or at least residue of their evil works).When the focus of play shifts to resolving conflicts where the stakes have real-world heft other than "what happens?" or "will we win?", setting design has a particular role to play: it needs to contain the right material to generate these contracts. This is somewhat table dependent, of course - different people are moved by different things - but the staples on which I tend to fall back are things like loyalty vs betrayal/freedom/transformation; vengeance vs impersonal efficiency; what price to avoid death?; how ruthlessly will you treat your fellow party members to get what you want? (This last one is definitely "handle with care", at least in my experience.)</blockquote>

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