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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7326084" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't think that was controversial. I assume that your players enjoy playing in your game, otherwise, why would they?That doesn't tell me whether or not they're passive, though. As you yourself posted,If players want only, or primarily loot and combat, then presumably they're happy for the GM to control all of the fiction, and just serve up combats with loots following behind them. (That seems to be how some modules work, eg many of the encounters in, and especially the dungeon at the end of, the 3E adventure Bastion of Broken Souls; the Horned Hold mini-dungeon in the 4e adventure Thunderspire Labyrinth; and plenty of others I've read.)If players want to "influence the world", then how does that work? Does the GM relinquish control over the setting - in which case it's no longer His/her campaign? Or does the player make suggestions, which the GM incorporates or not based on his/her conception of how his/her campaign world works?Well, given that I've done it in D&D I know how it can work.If you think it can work in a game in which the GM pre-authors the seting, and in which the GM is free to change that setting secretly if s/he wants, andin which the players only know those bits of the setting that the GM has narrated to them, and the GM is free to rely on secret elements of the setting to stipulate that action declarations fail - please tell me what you have in mind.A concrete example: a player wants to influence the setting by turning one ancient religious faction against another. This is going to depend upon a range of factors - theological/cosmological argument; histories of conflict or condordance between the factions; which leading personalities, both in the past and in the present, are assocated with the factions; etc.In the real world, a person might start learning all that stuff by going to a reearch library; than interviewing various people; etc. In a RPG in wich the GM is sole author of all those elements of the fiction, the player can only learn that stuff by having the GM provide summaries, short (50 to 100 word) paraphrases of the outcomes of reading books, talking to people, etc. How is the player going to prise that stuff free of the GM's presentation and framing of it so as to actually carry out his/her plan independently of the GM's view about the propsects for its success or failure?</blockquote>

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