What is the point of GM's notes?

[prabe]

The fact that all this info was provided though makes the world seem a lot more real and that is desirable for people in my playstyle. They might also decide to intervene in some way. Maybe they rustle up some food for the townsfolk. Who knows. It's up to the group. In many cases the group will do nothing but they will still be more immersed in a world that seems to be moving around them and isn't static.

It seems as though you are conflating "the GM has figured this out ahead of time" with "this feels more real." I'll grant it probably feels more objective to the GM, but that's not exactly the same thing as feeling more real to the players, or as fiction.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I realize you are joking but you are also making a serious critique and that critique illustrates the problem presented by terms like fiction and story.

Right. In a Story Now game, where you're making things up (or pretending) in the moment with only a little thinking about what could happen before play, "fiction" doesn't make sense because it doesn't capture the bits of writing down stories to tell players later. Meanwhile, "fiction" works much better for your approach because you are also writing down these stories to tell the players later AND making things up. This is a good point.

Perhaps we only need to use "fiction" when talking about "living worlds" so that most gamers understand that you're making up a story to tell the players about a planet (or planetoid) that is alive, because that really gets the concept across. Meanwhile, we can just use "pretend" for other approaches that aren't writing these stories to tell the players? How does that grab you?

 

[prabe]

Fiction also means story

Will you please get this through your head:

Fiction as a word includes story, but it's much, much broader than that. Fiction, as has been explained roughly ad nauseum, includes everything and anything made-up. By calling what emerges from play fiction we are not imputing to it any sort of structure or process, merely that it is not factual.

 

[Campbell]

And this is why fiction is loaded. You are loading assumptions into the word and it has everything to do with style. I would argue, the stuff that happens at the table matters but so does the stuff the GM prepares. If the GM decides "This castle is going to exist in this spot, no matter what" it exists in the setting, whether the players find it or not (and that is important because it should exist in the setting in a sandbox whether they find it, they don't, they find it in session one, or they find it in session 10, and treating as existing matters because even if they don't directly encounter it, they may encounter signs of its existence-----if there are encounters in the area around the castle, very possible those encounters are inhabitance of said castle for example---even if the players don't realize that until ten or twenty sessions later)

This is not about playstyle at all. I have a personal belief that prep exists to inform play, to make play more dynamic. That our shared experience is more important than our individual experiences. That's as consistent with sandbox play as it is for Story Now play as it is for Adventure Path play. I honestly do not see how it's all that contentious.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You do realize @Ovinomancer was using story instead of fiction for good reason, yes? They're not the same.

No I wasn't! I was clearly using "fiction" as the load bearing term it is, meaning both a story and stuff you make up. This is very important, I am told by most gamers, because otherwise "fiction" cannot support the weights it is supposed to, and this can have very bad repercussions for planets (or planetoids) that are alive. It is very important that "living world" proponents be able to fully capture the weights held up by "fiction" so that they can write down stories to tell players AND make things up. It is unfair to use these weighty words to also describe gaming where things are just made up -- no stories are written down by the GM. You can't have this kind of equivocation, because it makes the planets (or planetoids) that are alive very sad.

 

[prabe]

No I wasn't! I was clearly using "fiction" as the load bearing term it is, meaning both a story and stuff you make up. This is very important, I am told by most gamers, because otherwise "fiction" cannot support the weights it is supposed to, and this can have very bad repercussions for planets (or planetoids) that are alive. It is very important that "living world" proponents be able to fully capture the weights held up by "fiction" so that they can write down stories to tell players AND make things up. It is unfair to use these weighty words to also describe gaming where things are just made up -- no stories are written down by the GM. You can't have this kind of equivocation, because it makes the planets (or planetoids) that are alive very sad.

I think you just broke my sarcasmometer.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Will you please get this through your head:

Fiction as a word includes story, but it's much, much broader than that. Fiction, as has been explained roughly ad nauseum, includes everything and anything made-up. By calling what emerges from play fiction we are not imputing to it any sort of structure or process, merely that it is not factual.

It isn't that simple. Fiction as a term has several distinct meanings. One of those meanings is story. And if you look it up on google, the first definition to pop up is.....

literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It seems as though you are conflating "the GM has figured this out ahead of time" with "this feels more real." I'll grant it probably feels more objective to the GM, but that's not exactly the same thing as feeling more real to the players, or as fiction.

I think he is just saying it is an important part of making it feel real. I would say from the player side, I find settings to feel much more real when you know and can sense the GM has hashed out stuff like the geography in advance (and when you can tell he hasn't, or when he hasn't, I think it tends to make the setting feel more amorphous: which can be fine if it is heavy genre emulation, but for some approaches, you want a sense of a concrete world)

 

[prabe]

It isn't that simple. Fiction as a term has several distinct meanings. One of those meanings is story. And if you look it up on google, the first definition to pop up is.....

So, you're saying the people referring to "fiction" or "the fiction" are calling TRPGs literature?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think you just broke my sarcasmometer.

I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Is this another of those load bearing terms? It seems like it might... equivocate (and I shudder, because I think this is something those living worlds do to procreate).