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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7323016" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, as I intended the term in the OP fiction created at the table is not worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, as I've used it, is establishing a setting, and setting material, in advance of play. ( [MENTION=6776133]Bawylie[/MENTION] used the term in a broader sense not too far upthread. That's fine; I think I got he was saying clearly enough. But [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] was not using it in that broad sense, I don't think, of any way of establishing the setting.)I don't see any reason to suppose it should sound the same it all.Think of it this way - preparing a speech is very different from having a conversation. No one would suggest that engaging in conversation is just like writing a speech but in real time!Likewise in RPGing. A GM who narrates content as part of a conversation with the players about the shared fiction their PCs find themselves inhabiting is doing something very different from a GM who tells the players something that the GM made up all by him-/herself some time earlier.I have doubts about this contrast. A big part of playing a NPC or monster is giving voice to his/her/its personality, personal backstory, motivations, etc. To focus on playing the NPC or monster is to focus on establishing those things, and what they mean in the current situation. So I don't see how thinking about those things is any sort of distraction from playing that character.Well, this is (more or less) what Dungeonworld means when it says "play to find out". Although the process for the GM is very different for the players, because they occupy different roles in the conversation that makes up the game with different sorts of authority over the shared fiction, over framing, etc.But that is not an answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for". It's an account of how play proceeds with less, or no, worldbuilding. It's main relevance to this thread is that the answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for" is not otherwise RPGing can't take place.OK, but what does it mean to "provide a game - with predesigned world, maps, history, cultures, possible storylines - for my players to play in"?The language you use, that I've quoted, is metaphor. (Contrast: if you provide a swimming pool for your friends to swim in, that is literal, not metaphorical.) To answer [MENTION=284]Caliban[/MENTION], the main agenda of this thread is to dispense with metaphor and try to get some descriptions of actual social practices, and their rationale.For instance, "providing history and cultures for your players" presumably means telling them these sorts of characters are permitted; these other sorts aren't. It might mean, if a player declares an action "I search the room for a copy of the missing map", replying "You find nothing" without rolling the dice (or perhaps pretending to make a check but in fact stipulating the answer regardless of the roll), because you have written down, in advance, the contents of the room and they don't include a map.What is that sort of stuff for?</blockquote>

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