It sounds like you are willing to go to great lengths on behalf of your players to insure that they have a good game-night experience, but I have to ask, do you ever feel like you go too far in indulging your players? Is it reasonable to ask them to maybe make the effort to rise to the occasion, instead of repeatedly shifting gears from game-night to game-night?
I don't feel that way very often; if I did, I admit it would be time to reassess how comfortable I was advocating the style (at least as it works for me). Sometimes I do run into mental blocks with what a player would like to do and what I think makes sense, and those are reconciled away from the table; I'm still working with my wife on one particular stumbling block for our private Hollowfaust-meets-Pride-and-Prejudice game. Usually, what players want to do requires fairly little readjustment, particularly in settings that are built as we go. If conflicts do arise, I have to ask myself whether I'm the unreasonable one, though. Sometimes I am.
I'll be honest, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "introducing them to the setting by giving them things to react to," so I'm not quite sure what to make of this.
Usually it's starting with one major prod to get them reacting to as a group: grisly murders on the outskirts of the village, a stolen body, things of that nature. An event to expedite getting the players together and moving as one.
Maybe the example of how I started a very recent game would help?
When I got my list of players, I sent a list of potential game pitches around, and gradually they voted it down to "Tanglestone: a sprawling, labyrinthine city mostly empty, isolated from the rest of the world, populated by strange and baroque people who have never seen the Outside." My notes on the city were a couple of pages of handwritten ideas at that point. Then players proposed characters, and I talked with them about how to make them fit just so. Some of their ideas were different than what I'd originally envisioned for the city — one player picked an elf monk, for instance, and I had no previous plans for elves to appear as a race, or for a monastic order. But I adjusted the idea of the city accordingly, planting a small faction of elves into an orchard district and proposing a monastery set atop the spires of the immense cathedral structure that held many temples. The same happened when another player picked an assassin: a bit of conversation, and then we determined that one-half of the law enforcement of the city, so to speak, would be the guild-clan of the Night Sweepers, a somewhat sinister organization that keeps the streets clean and safe at night.
Now, the player of the librarian in the game is quite proactive, and handed me a long list of potential story hooks for his character: teaching literacy to other guild-clans, questing for long-lost books, rising floodwaters in the library basement imperiling the books, and so on. Some were goals that the character would actively pursue, but others were things I would stage that he'd like to react to. The player of the monk, on the other hand, is perfectly happy reacting to things of my choosing — he's a manager who can spend from 9:30-4:30 in meetings chasing important agendas on game day, so he tends to like letting other people (like me) do most of the active scheming for a change.
To begin the game, I selected "rising floodwaters" from the librarian player's list: I figured out a cause for it (picking a potential antagonist from one of those pages of notes: "filth king?"), added the complication that it was also a problem in the catacombs, and then let the players investigate. So there's an example of players shaping a plot (but not a script) in a way other than in-character actions.
On a more general note, doesn't every referee introduce the setting in play to some degree? I mean, I've introduced new gamers to the Third Imperium for Traveller, a sprawling sandbox setting, and I spent no more than seven or eight minutes before character creation describing the foundational conceits and another few minutes describing the sector where play would begin - the rest was introduced as needed. For Le Ballet de l'Acier, a historical setting, the players don't need to read Mousnier's two-volume history of the institutions of Ancien Regime France to get started - they just need to know at the outset, "Paris, 1625, The Three Musketeers - go!" and the detail gets added as the game progresses.
Yes indeed. So here's another potential example of clarification. When I'm adding details to a setting, sometimes they're ad-libbed answers to a character's questions, same as you describe. "Is there a glassblower in the Crafter Block?" "There'd have to be. Give me a second..."
Sometimes, though, they're reactions to character suggestions. "It would be awesome if I could find a work on this whole cults-in-the-noble houses that laid out which houses were prosecutors, which ones were eliminated, things like that." "That sounds good. (I hadn't thought about the prosecutors being from within the noble houses, but that's actually a better suggestion; internecine strife would introduce the theme of rot from within more solidly, and it suggests that at least one of the prosecutor houses might have something to hide.) Yes, you do find a work of that nature."
Bear in mind that the latter approach is still subject to judicial review: a player proposes a new plot twist, and the GM makes sure that incorporating that suggestion doesn't give the player characters an easy path over adversity. It may be the GM says "That's an interesting idea" but holds to the original vision of how the world would appear/react more often than he adapts the player suggestion. But I'm assuming that the distinction is that it's done at all.
The reason I like storytelling elements in play is that they tend to enable genre convention and theme as major participants. In the Tanglestone game, for instance, running with the player's suggestion actually gave us more opportunity to steep in the theme of gradual decay and the walls beginning to crumble. There's more dry rot and wormwood. Verisimilitude is measured a bit differently; though the world is more malleable to player desires than might be realistic, it winds up feeling more appropriate, more thematic. Their suggestions nudge the world closer to as they see it.
Does that make some measure of sense?
No matter how much time I have to prep, there is no way I can detail every chateau and village in France, or every hectare of every planet in the Third Imperium, or what-have-you. Large sections of my settings perforce must remain broadly defined, but what I do know is enough to improvise in such a way as to maintain the integrity and verisimilitude of the setting as we play. For example, sometimes all I've got is a sentence or even just a few words, like my notes for the province of Auvergne in France ("Medieval Appalachia," reflecting the fact that Auvergnats tend to be isolated and rustic), but it's enough on which to build as the need arises.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it may simply be the methodology by which the inchoate portions of the game take form — and the precise things you're trying to simulate, be it theme, dramatic convention or an alternate reality — that distinguish the two styles.
(And I'm from Southern Appalachia; it tickles me to consider a French translation of "you'uns.")
For me that's part of the pitch before the game even starts: if we're playing 'space truckers' of the Third Imperium, or swashbucklers in the France of Dumas and Sabatini and Weyman, the kinds of conflicts likely to arise in the course of the game should be generally understood from the outset, so there is at least some measure of tacit acceptance of what may come down the track after the game begins.
I'm generally not so well-prepared as to figure out all my potential conflicts ahead of time. "Wicked fae abducting children" might occur to me when the game's in motion, only for me to find out that a given player is not really cool with too much children-as-exclusive-targets dread.
While I can give the players a general precis of what they might be doing, their suggestions might change my mind, and new things might occur to me as the setting is built over the course of play. So in case something crops up that wasn't mentioned in the original discussion, I have my guiding principle to adhere to.
