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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732036" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the number of GMs who wrote all the backstory in advance of actual play is zero, or very close to that.Just to give one example: many GMs, especially of D&D, use random encounters. When a random encounter occurs, the being in question needs to be given beliefs, backstory, motivation, etc. I've never heard of a GM who worked out all this stuff ahead of time.And the idea that it's bad GMing to give the random encounter an interesting motivation is one that I think is unique to you, or very nearly. I've never encountered anyone else who espouses it.I think the number of gameworlds that exhibit this property is very close to zero also.One example: the PCs meet a peasant. They ask the peasant what she ate for breakfast that morning. The GM probably has to make something up. So the actual causation of the authoring of the world (the GM writes something now in response to a question) does not mirror the ingame direciton of causation.I think examples like that are pretty common in RPGing."Internal causality" is itself purely imaginary - ie the imagined causal connections between imagined events. And there is no reason at all for it to track real world causality.Here is an example that makes the point:I can imagine now a peasant telling me what she ate for breakfast in the past, and I can imagine that her telling me that is caused by her past event of having eaten that breakfast - the imagined events have an imaginary causal structure - eating breakfast then causes the peasant to tell me now what she ate then - that is not mimiced by my process of imagination - ie I imagine first what she tells me, and then - because of that first imagining - go on to imagine that her telling me so is caused by her past breakfast eating.That is a completely unremarkable - even typical - example of the imaginative process. It is very apt to produce believable worlds. The idea that the world becomes unbelievable because the GM doesn't have a record of the peasant's breakfast, and makes that up only because a player's action declaration forces a bit of the gameworld's past to be authored, is one that I have never heard espoused by anyone but you.</blockquote>

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