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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6518189" data-attributes="member: 42582">The existence, in the fiction, of a horse within a certain geographic distance of the PC, which has a history, and has a level-appropriate guardian.This changes the fiction - for instance, it makes it true in the fiction that this horse was born N years ago, for some value of N probably greater than 3; it makes it true that that horse came into the possession of an evil guardian (or found itself running loose in the wild needing to be tamed, or whatever challenge the GM sets); etc.But for the players decision to have his/her PC call for a warhorse, none of that fictional content would be part of the shared gameworld and backstory.I don't understand the point of this. Yes, by having a paladin class available it is accepted that the player has the authority, when his/her PC reaches 4th level, to dictate the existence of a warhorse with a guardian, a location etc.But that doesn't tell us that it is not player authorship. It's not as if player authorship is defined by being something not permitted in the rules.Suppose I wrote up an "Explorer" class, and that class had, as a name-level capstone ability "Lost World: at any time after reaching this level you may declare that your character has heard stories of a lost world. Consult your GM for details of the rumours in question, but the lost world will be one which your PC can reach (with some difficulty) and which contains lost treasures worth discovering."That would be a class feature which came into the game because everyone at the table agreed that the Explorer class was a permitted origin. It would also be a rule that permitted player authorship - when the player chooses to use the power, it thereby becomes true that the gameworld contains a lost world, with treasures worth discovering, of which rumours come to the PC in question.The AD&D paladin's power to call for a warhorse has the same basic structure.The player forcing the GM to create certain stuff is player authorship - especially when the stuff is that a horse having certain properties is in a non-trivially-defused situation within a week or so's journey. The GM gets to fill in the details, but that's unremarkable. Most player authorship mechanics leave it to the GM to fill in the details - part of a GM's job is to flesh out elements of the fiction created by the players, and integrate them into the rest of the gameworld backstory. For instance, if a player - as part of writing up his/her PC background - describes the village that his/her PC comes from, the GM might be the one who places it on a map, decides which local lord has control over the village, etc. But the creation of the village by the player is still an instance of player authorship.Another example a bit like this came up in my session this past weekend. One of the players in my (non-D&D) game added some extra backstory onto his PC, as part of fleshing out the PC's goals and motivations. It had already been established that the PC has a brother who is a powerful sorcerous rival, and is trying to turn himself into a balrog; the player added that the trouble had begun when the two of them were helping in the defence of an ancient besieged city ("Byzantium" was the label the player gave) and the brother had tried to cast a mighty spell to destroy of an onrushing horde of orcs: the spell had mis-fired, and as a result the brother had become possessed by a greater demon - hence his turn from the light to the darkness, and the quest to become a balrog.The fact that I will be the one who actually names the city and places it on the map (given that I am using the Greyhawk maps, I think "Byzantium" is either Verbobonc, Dyvers or Greyhawk) is not relevant to the question of whether or not this is player authorship. The player's choices about his PC's backstory introduced new content into the shared fiction of the campaign world, which otherwise would not have been there.This also happens when the player of a paladin calls for his warhorse - new content (most importantly, the existence nearby of a warhorse who is not easy to take or tame) is introduced into the shared fiction of the campaign world.</blockquote>

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