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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7322726" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes - this is the basic premise of Moldvay Basic.WIthout wanting to quibble too much over definitions, I want to extend your critique of artificial distinctions all the way! Establishing that the world was shaped by great migrations (as per the first few pages of the World of Greyhawk folio), and establishing that the front door of the dungeon is made of adamantine, are both acts of authoring the fiction. They establish setting - the world in which the PCs have their adventures.To summarise it in a way that is probabaly open to myriad counter-examples, I think that nouns = worldbuilding, establishing a setting. Once you also get a verb that takes a PC as its object - then you have situation. If the verb is very big and the subject noun tends to drop out of sight then you can get RPGing where setting really becomes just colour and backdrop (and doesn't do the work you identified upthread, of providing tools for the players to use in their RPGing). I'm not thinking of a D&amp;D example off-hand - maybe arena-oriented play? - but I think The Dying Earth RPG probably tends towards this, and I would say that Cortex+ Heroic does also, though maybe not quite as much as The Dying Earth.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7322726, member: 42582"] Yes - this is the basic premise of Moldvay Basic. WIthout wanting to quibble too much over definitions, I want to extend your critique of artificial distinctions all the way! Establishing that the world was shaped by great migrations (as per the first few pages of the World of Greyhawk folio), and establishing that the front door of the dungeon is made of adamantine, are both acts of authoring the fiction. They establish setting - the world in which the PCs have their adventures. To summarise it in a way that is probabaly open to myriad counter-examples, I think that [I]nouns[/I] = worldbuilding, establishing a setting. Once you also get a verb that takes a PC as its object - then you have [I]situation[/I]. If the verb is very big and the subject noun tends to drop out of sight then you can get RPGing where setting really becomes just colour and backdrop (and doesn't do the work you identified upthread, of providing tools for the players to use in their RPGing). I'm not thinking of a D&D example off-hand - maybe arena-oriented play? - but I think The Dying Earth RPG probably tends towards this, and I would say that Cortex+ Heroic does also, though maybe not quite as much as The Dying Earth. [/QUOTE]

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