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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732851" data-attributes="member: 42582">Unless your game unfolds in a moment-for-moment correlatoin of real time and ingame events, stuff is being "skipped" - the narration of the gameworld is not total. It can't be.Narration in a RPG involves choosing stuff that is salient. I don't see why you seem so horrified by the fact that I tend not to find the architectural details of building, sewers etc the most salient things.Obviously. My point is that if (1) is permitted, then everytime the GM does (2) she is choosing not to do (1) instead. Which means that whether or not the players get what they want depends, in effect, on the GM's opinion as to whether X or Q is better for the game.How is that not railroading?Again, this is the GM dictating outcomes based on his/her view of what makes for good fiction. (Because, after all, s/he could have taken the player's implicity suggestion and switched from X to Q.) Again, isn't that the definition of railroading? Ie the GM decides all the outcomes.While from the DM side I'm every bit as capable - maybe more so - of writing a boring dungeon as the next guy, as a player the whole scouting-mapping-exploration bit is a huge part of the game.You can run an exploration-focused episode of RPGing without extensive pre-authorship. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?299440-Exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-Sunday" target="_blank">Here's the actual play report of a session of that kind</a>.I don't understand what you mean by "It just appears there".In your game, you determine the weather with a random roll. Does that mean the clouds "Just appear there?"Using the results of random rolls to establish the content of the shared fiction is as old as published RPGing - original D&D used wandering monster rolls, for instance. Obviously, when the monsters "appear", in the fiction they came from somewhere (even if that "somewhere" is a magical monster spawner). Likewise, if a check means that a PC finds a map, the map has a causal history every bit as complex as every other object in the gameworld.Let's put to one side that this example makes some assumptions about play which probably don't obtain in an actual game being played in a "say 'yes' or roll the dice" manner - for instance, it seems unlikely that the map is a high-stakes item for every PC.But that to one side, consider this: what happens if the GM's wandering monster table has some particular NPC on it (as is the case in X2 Castle Amber), and the PCs split up, and the wandering monster die comes up "6" for all of them, and then the encounter for each of them, oddly enough, comes up as Guillame D'Amberville?Oddly enough, I think classic D&D weathered this possibility - there are numerous ways of handling it which we probably don't need to go through here (the most obvious: the first roll settles the matter).The same is true for your example.Edit:By deciding where the map is; and by choosing whether or not to move it from room 14 to 18, or even to some bit of room 11 that the PCs haven't searched yet (eg they've checked the chests, but not behind the tapestry, and the GM decides putting the map behind the tapestry would be more fun); the GM decides whether or not the players' declaration that their PCs search will bear fruit.</blockquote>

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